Make a wish.

 

  

 

 

No, I mean it. Make a wish.

 

 

 

 

Seriously! Make a wish! Goddamnit!

 

 

 

 

 

Didja make one? Eh? Eh? Didja? DIDJA??! DID YOU?!

  

     This is not an ordinary chain letter. In fact, it has been magically BLESSED by the GIANT NYAA-NYAA of POWER in the great PLAINS of ESGARDIOTH. The AUTHOR is a great and POWERFUL man by the name of SQUATCH and he HAS placed a CURSE OF witchCRAFT on this. SATAN (and by that we mean the BUFFALO SABRES’ right wing MIROSLAV ŠATAN) WILL WATCH and make sure THIS IS sent out. 

     Your wish will only come true IF YOU MAIL this to FIFTY-SEVEN AND ONE THIRDS people within FOUR days of receiving this. If you do NOT send this out you will WITNESS a FIERY CAR WRECK from a COMFORTABLY SAFE DISTANCE, and your CHILDREN will have NIGHTMARES about being born without NOSTRILS but maybe ALSO ABOUT CAULIFLOWER, and your SPOUSE will FLATULENTLY EXPLODE in the FOYER THEY JUST CLEANED, and your parents will ABSENTMINDEDLY misplace their SPAGHETTI STRAINER, and your friends will HATE you because you will develop PROJECTILE LEPROSY! I am not kidding! Really! IGNORE THIS AT YOUR PERIL!!!1!! !! !!!

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Okay, so I’m kidding. No, the great Squatch did not curse that with satanic witchcraft, nor will your children be born without nostrils if you don’t send it out. But the point is there.

Every single day I’m bombarded with at least twenty pieces of nonsense email like that. I have never sent one on and I have never been stalked by Satan, lost friends, or exploded flatulently. There are people that are afraid to chance it, though, so these things continue getting forwarded around.

And behind each poorly written chain email is someone who found it necessary, for some reason, to inflict these things on us. Somebody somewhere sat at a computer thinking that it would be a funny way to… I don’t know what they’re thinking, really. Do they expect to become known throughout the internet by writing chain letters?

I don’t think there’s anything malicious about it, aside from poking the superstitious and I doubt that whoever originally wrote these had any idea of what he or she was starting, because it’s probably just some seven-year-old with his or her brand-new computer, judging by the spelling.

But why the hell are people spreading these things around?

Back before the great Email blitz of the nineties, chain letters were a thing of the mail. Every single one originated somewhere in Brazil, and was allegedly written by some priest in Florida, and if you didn’t send it out, interesting things would happen to your personal life or something. With internet email becoming the default for correspondence these days, they’ve taken it to the logical ends. Since email is a lot faster than old snail mail, chain emails get spread around a lot faster.

I have no doubts that within days of releasing this I will have the mother lode of chain letters in my electronic mailbox from people who think that I have no right to be talking about this or that by acknowledging it I’m somehow cursing us all to lose our spaghetti strainers. Somebody somewhere will get somehow offended that I’ve slandered sacred spam and will decide to release their entire mail packet upon me. Don’t bother, but also go ahead, because I won’t read them. I don’t read anything that has a (fwd) somewhere in the message header anymore.

For those of you who actually write these, let me tell you that I did send copies of one chain email that I’d received. Then I made my wish. I sent it to UnauthBot, the ListServ that handles this email newsletter, which then sent it to three hundred (carefully selected) people over the net. My wish?

My wish for that chain letter was for people to stop writing chain letters.

Make my wish come true, Baby.

AJH