| Chain mail |
You are the proud recipient of a chain letter,
At the age of 12 my first and only chain letter arrived in the mail from one of my friends. Reading the letter was a strange experience, seeing something that “serious” written in another 12 year olds best cursive was laughable. The letter instructed me to hand copy (seven times) the contents of the letter and mail those copies to my other friends. If I failed to do so in the allotted time (seven days), seven years of bad luck would befall me. There were many stipulations including; use only white lined paper, no Xerox copies, and no repeat recipients. The list of the people to whom my friend had sent his copies (so there would be no mistakes in my addressing) dutifully followed as an addendum to the main body of the letter itself. I could not help but think how much time the seven-page letter took him to write, even if he was just copying. I never went through the trouble to find out, I told my friend he was an idiot.
Now we have e-chain mail letters, which are worse than their post office counterparts because all you have to do is forward them to everyone in your address book, no time, or postage required. Amazingly, the actual form of the letter has not changed much since my youth. Although the first paragraph usually contains a small preamble to the “original letter” and the customary letter opening of “Dear (your name),” has been removed. Some common e-chain mail preambles:
I thought this was just another bogus chain e-mail forward but…
This letter was originally sent by 7 year old cancer patient Stephen who…
You should be as outraged about the message below as I was…
This is cool…
And then there are the testimonials, thank you Ron Popeil.
“I thought the letter was bull and just deleted it like it was spam, and as soon as I did my hard drive crashed, can you believe it? I lost my doctoral thesis and now I won’t graduate for another two years…if only I had just forwarded on the message”
Joe M.
Portland, OR.
“I was so glad I forwarded on this message to all of my friends, I always thought the messages were kind of crap, but hey you never know right and when you have something on the line why take a chance… I won 277 million dollars in Power Ball that very night.”
Peggy T.
Walla Walla, WA
Make no copies of this and send them to yourself. This letter has been copy written and is intended for the private use of the addressee. Reproduction and/or making of chain letters out of this letter or it’s contents is strictly prohibited. This letter has been around for 70,000,000 years please break the chain if you do not many years of bad luck will come upon you.