Vantage point




Monday, October 22, 2007

There are forwards and then.... there are forwards

Here's the thing. Not all forwards are bad. By and large I delete all forwards with a cussword directed at the senders. But these are usually forwards which are inane. I do not want to be part of a divine email chain about ganesha or venkateshwara or some such deity who has enough time on hand to follow email trails. I also do not want inane zero-intellect observations about men and women, or about Indians and Americans. I do not want stories about people who missed out their last chance to say or do something nice for someone. And I definitely do not want inspiring stories about brave individuals who overcame some crippling illness to achieve something great in life. And please oh please, I do not want idiotic puzzles with a glaringly obvious catch that you were stupid enough to miss or gif files which require me to stare at some image for 15 seconds. I could also do without the standard event-related jokes (like "Misbah hit the last chip shot in the T20 cup because he didnt know there was a mallu in every corner of the world") that I usually get on chat before anyone composes an email about them.

The forwards I do not mind are the ones which are funny, witty and non-standard. Like Becky the Dublin girl. Or the material girl from New York who posted a message on craigslist wondering how to bag a millionaire. Those are the kind of forwards I could do with.

Now you may say.... how can one differentiate between the two? Which forwards are inane and which are witty? A simple thumb rule is, what you do before forwarding them. If you send them to a standard set of email IDs saved in your email program, no thanks. If you just hit the forward button with a pointless message like "this is good!", please excuse. If you do not wait for even 10 seconds before you send out the forward, kindly adjust.

However, if you pick and choose the recipients, write a non-standard message accompaying the main message body, and actually take efforts to delete the email IDs, headers and footers from the previous message, sure, send it across.