Email abuse.

I have done my level bet to take myself off the grid. Aspects of day to day life I find offensive, clutter clogging up the bandwidth of my day and distractions I don’t want or need. I bundle these things together in one big ball of shit and by avoiding or limiting my exposure, I keep the turd ball small, not overly smelly and flushable.

Here are the things falling into this category: junk mail - including all the stupid crap from the phone company (instead of mailing me that garbage, I wish they would just lower my bill), sales calls to my house phone (which I have managed to curtail to next to nothing) and the forwarded email.

Forwarded emails can be anything from the stupid joke you just got sent by someone else in your email circle, another one of those amazing but true emails, or the political diatribe. Chances are if the only time I get an email from you is something falling into one of the three aforementioned categories you are very, very close from having me block all your emails.

And I know it sounds amazingly curmudgeonly of me to put it in those terms but I look to the world to provide me with stimulation and things that will enrich my life. I’ve just never received an email based around those topics that has done either. There are three or four people currently subjecting me to this kind of abuse, three or four people who – while I find them to be interesting people – only seem to be able to get something cluttering up their own email box and do their best to spread the clutter. These are people whose opinions I value but instead of sending along something they have originated, they choose to spread the spurious or the mundane.

Half of this stuff is an outright lie or fallacy. Another large portion is the manner in which email viruses spread.

These forwarded messages fall into the following categories:

• Chain emails – where if I don’t propagate the crap some horrible fate will befall me.
  
  
• The life lesson email – where I am so important to someone that while they can’t be bothered to send along a note every now and again to actually communicate with me but amazingly with whom I rank so highly they are compelled to send along spam telling me how important I am to them
  
  
• The political rant – when Bush was in office it was from Democrats and now that Obama is in office they’re from Republicans
  
  
• The stupid joke – more often than not these are jokes you wouldn’t tell to co-workers at your job because they would result in you getting fired because they are either racist, homophobic or bigoted in some manner
  
  
• The picture email – an array or single picture showing something strange or odd with an accompanying one or two line stupid description which is usually a failed attempt at humor.

Now, I like to hear from people. I like to hear about what is going on in there lives, what they are excited about and what they’re working on but if all a person can cobble together is maybe three words (and more often than not it’s less) before clicking on the forward button then, I probably don’t want to get it so save us both the trouble and just keep it to yourself.