The Anti-Chain Letter

I hate chain letters. Hate them with a passion and I haven't passed one forward in like forever. They vary from ridiculous to just plain sappy. (And they are used only to build up mailing list for mass marketers.) My favorite one of all time was the one where if you passed it on, Microsoft would check out all the names on the list and give everyone $1,000. Of course, no one stopped to do the math. I did. There are about 270 million people in the US. If even only half got in on the email, that would be $135 billion dollars. The total market capitalization of Microsoft is around $100 billion.

And then there are the sappy ones. Yes, there are good causes to give money to. Yes, we all have a million friends that we should think of more often. Yes, I want to help that little doggie in the window. No, I don't want to read about it every two seconds in my email. I reserve that for my porn offers. Gotta have priorities...

Anyway, so as retaliation, I think I should start one that implores people not to give in and take part in chain emails. The penalty would be that if you don't forward this to 1000 people, the internet will fail and everyone will get a case of the heebie jeebies for 2 hours. Of course, this would be against all of my principles. But if I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times:

Irony is delicious!