Is your workplace email inundated with forwards like mine is? I get loads of them. Sometimes they are funny. I especially like the ones with pictures but instantly delete the ones with a lot of writing - I don't have time to read a lot of forwards when I have other things that must be read that take precedence. What I get really annoyed with is political and otherwise "is that really based on fact like you claim it is" forwards. EXAMPLE: I got this picture recently in an email. Now I may be totally overreacting - it's just a forwarded image. But for those of you who have lived through a tornado, there is no possible way that the electricity, power lines and trees would not be affected by the turbulent 100+ MPH winds only hundreds of yards away from this structure. I didn't believe this was an original and undoctored image, googled it to be sure, and then emailed my colleagues back to let them know that this was a photo-shopped image. I think I offended some people.The reason I write this though is that I get way too many political emails at work. It is just not the place to send them. And some of them are so obviously not based on fact, or are so inflammatory that I really want to scream, "Where is the workplace etiquette?" I sometimes feel like I am being badgered at work through all of these "If you don't forward this email, you are not patriotic" garbage. While sometimes some of the statements in these forwards are generally accurate, more often they are blatantly (at least to me) not, and I roll my eyes and instantly hit 'delete'. I wish the senders would just do a simple Google search before pressing 'Send'. As these emails are so - in my experience in Utah - right sided, I feel for my coworkers who are of other political views. I'm not sure how to bring this up without causing trouble in the faculty, but sending political propaganda is just not appropriate at work!
My friend Ann got an email Power Point that claimed that Great Britain no longer teaches students about the Holocaust in order to avoid offending Muslim students who think that the Holocaust is fake. She asked me if I had ever heard anything about it and together we looked it up by the same medium that brought the information. If the original creator of the PP would have done a few seconds worth of research, he or she would have found out the full story which states...well, I'll give you, if interested, the opportunity to look it up yourself. Remember the old saying about how you can't believe everything you see on TV? Well, the same goes for the internet, and I am bothered that even if something seems too much to be true that we as a collective body will so often push send before thinking. So how do I tactfully let my coworkers know this? Am I making too big of a deal over photo-shopped sunsets and missing children that were never missing and 'add your name to this petition and don't delete it or the government will never get four years worth of name collecting and it will be all your fault and the nation will crumble' emails?
Really, I'm asking for advice. HELP!!!!!!!!!!
5 comments:
I hate these too and have come to the conclusion that they are mostly sent by people who weren't really online when they all went out the first time. Sad to say, but there are some people who send emails that I just see the sender name and delete. I guess it is still a novelty to them and they seem to think that everything on the internet isn't real, but everything someone sends in an email is.
I concur, but don't really have a response as to WHY people thing that e-mail forwards are read-worthy, or how to get people to stop. I, too, only like the ones with funny pictures, and rarely take the time to read the ones that are, well, just words. And I hope there aren't too many people out there who are hurt because I don't salute them as women or send my love by forwarding a message on IN ADDITION to sending it back to the person who sent it to me in the first place. Or that I don't believe in God or Jesus because I don't click send. Luckily I don't have to deal with it at work like you do.
Yes yes yes yes yes. I have to add the "don't feed your child any products with X in it or they will spontaneously combust from Chinese hamster pox or tainted milk" I am so sick of the alarmists, really. You , of course, said it perfectly in your post. I also have a rule that if a forward has anything to do with me getting bad luck or good luck based on how many people I do or do not send it to then I automatically don't send it to anyone. Regardless of how noteworthy the actual forward was, if it has requirements to forward then it stops with me.
I agree with Claudia, also. I hate the ones that require you send it back to the original sender. WHO DOES THAT?
After the bailout package for $85 million was approved for AIG, I got an email from a dude in my ward that works at Intel as an engineer. He knew I was in finance so he forwarded it to me. The point was that if we should give the $85 billion to the estimated 200 million americans over the age of 18. The forward said that would leave $425k for each of those Americans. Go ahead and do the long division yourself and that brilliant solution. I replied to all so that everyone he forwarded to would realize that the mathmatical premise of his forward was grossly invalid. I stopped getting forwards from that guy.
I got that email too - and my thought was, if everyone is so annoyed that these companies would get a bailout, why is it suddenly ok for each American to get a bailout (regardless of the math of it). So instead of keeping the world economy going, lets further indulge an already greedy people by giving them "free" money that most would not, in reality, use to get rid of the pit of debt they had dug themselves into which the bailout would be intended for. I'm not excluding myself from this statement...but I know I would have paid off debt. THEN I would have gone on a trip.
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