PET PEEVE!!! (WARNING--RANT AHEAD)

I work in IT and I've been a user of internet e-mail since 1991, so maybe the novelty of it has worn off. I get between 50-100 e-mails a day, every day. This only refers to the e-mail that passes through the multiple spam and virus filters that we employ to block the folks who are hawking V1@gr@ and porn and low mortgage rates. I realize that there are people out there who get four or five e-mails from their friends in a week's time, and they're happy to get every piece of it, so I realize that not everybody feels about it the way I do. But I have one big e-mail pet peeve. I'll give it to you in a nutshell. If your e-mail looks like this:

[numerous e-mail addresses]

FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: [some stupid crap]

[numerous e-mail addresses]

FW: FW: FW: FW: [some stupid
crap]

[numerous e-mail addresses]

FW: FW: FW: [some stupid
crap]

[numerous e-mail addresses]

FW: FW: [some stupid crap]

[numerous e-mail addresses]

FW: [some stupid crap]

[blah blah blah blah blah]

Please pass this onto your friends even if you don't usually
take time to forward mail...do it this time! If this touched you as much
as it touched me, please forward it on.

I DON'T WANT IT!!! Don't you people have something better to do than forward this crap to me? Half the time whatever is in the e-mail is some urban legend or hoax that has little basis in fact, and the other half of the time it's some sappy shmaltz that I can't believe I wasted two minutes of my life reading. I'm not getting that time back, people!

It's getting to the point when I see an e-mail from certain people that I know, I can just go ahead and delete it without review because I know it is totally worthless. My company gets around one million e-mails a week. We have less than 500 employees. That's over 2000 e-mails a week for the average worker, and you know what? Ninety-eight percent of it literally is garbage. We filter that crap out before it even gets inside the firewall. Junk like this message makes up another half a percent. Okay, you say, half a percent isn't so much. Well, that's 5000 e-mails in a week. If it takes a person thirty seconds during their workday to read those messages, that's 41 person-hours wasted. That's a work week wasted for Pete's sake! And that's just one small company out of thousands. If you are sending these messages (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE), FREAKING STOP IT ALREADY!!! I don't need to get an e-mail to convince me that God loves me, that we should support our soldiers or that illegal immigration is a problem. No one has signed a law prohibiting us from going to church, 9/11 wasn't staged by the government, and there is no secret e-mail program that Bill Gates' is going to pay me $1000 to beta test for him. Viruses ARE a problem, but sending an e-mail to warn me about one is not the best way to handle it, especially since many viruses are spread by e-mail, and most likely we're going to catch those anyway. There's hardly anything you can send me in an e-mail that I haven't already learned somewhere else, unless it's personal, and in that case I'm all ears. I would love to get a personal note telling me how you are doing and asking about my family. But DON'T SEND ME ANY MORE OF THIS CRAP!

I mean it.