Send this to 20 people and die!

I HAVE been reading my e-mails. There were 38. Two of them contained something meaningful. Sixteen were trying to sell me something I didn’t want. I can handle that.

The rest were the kind of material that convinces you the human race could do with some serious culling.

If I receive one more message with a picture of a kitten, a baby, the sun’s rays filtering through a grove of trees, and a message telling me that someone loves me, I am going to track down the sender and shove my computer somewhere the sun’s rays are never going to reach!

Actually no, they will receive only the keyboard. The monitor I shall reserve for those messages that also implore me to send the message on to another 10 people or receive bad luck.

Who are these people, for heaven’s sake! Do they really believe that stuff? Are they genuinely so thoroughly marinaded in cloying, unctuous, and saccharine sentimentality?

In which case they should be humanely destroyed.

Or do they do it because they are electronic vandals with nasty personalities? In which case they should be inhumanely destroyed.

Most of these people exhorting me to express my deep affection for the human race are people I’ve never heard of.

I give you a sample. It was vomited into my terminal yesterday and came complete with 12 odious little homilies, two of which were:

A trure friend is someone who reaches for your hand and touches your heart.

Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.

Smile because this happened? I’d rather die! And what kind of a true friend sends me this garbage, complete with the little message at the end that says; “You will have good luck for two years if you send this to eight people or more. You must send it in five minutes or your good luck will run out.”

What do they have for brains! Don’t they ever ask questions! Like: I’ve just had my leg amputated. You want me to smile because it happened?

Luckily the sender of this one is someone I’ve never heard. Just as well really because his message assures me he’d hug me if he could.

But some of this stuff comes from people I know. People I thought had different tastes! – Barry, who has a rottweiler, and tattoos you can glimpse through the body hair. On his back.

He sent one that included: never frown, even when you are sad, because you never know who is falling in love with your smile.

How can you not frown when your terminal is filled with these neatly packaged parcels of emetic claptrap?

I want to send it back to him and tell him to keep his distorted sense of reality to himself. Then I remember his distorted sense of reality includes a rottweiler and knuckles that scrape the ground and I merely delete it instead.

But the really frightening part is that these things are circling the globe faster than the story about the poodle and the Chinese restaurant. They are proliferating to the point where they will soon reach critical mass and the world will involuntarily eject a stream of diced carrot, tomato skins and facile platitudes into an unsuspecting universe.

Do me a favour. Get on to the Townsville Bulletin website, download this column, send it to 20 of your friends and tell them they will have serious bad luck (like receiving even more unsolicited garbage from people who want to hug them) if they don’t pass it on.

We’ll get the bastards yet!