With friends like these...

I try not to enforce too many rules on my friends, but let me drop some science on “McGONE’S RULES OF E-MAIL ETIQUETTE.”

Do you remember chain letters from back in the stone age before PCs? Yeah, they sucked. They weren’t very useful, except as a good way to make a kid grip his shit in fear that something bad was going to happen to him if he didn’t comply by rewriting stupid letters and sending them to 10 people. The chain letter sensation of my youth may be directly link to the phenomenon of postal workers... going postal, as it were.

Somehow this utterly useless practice made the jump to the electronic age.

Here now is my rule:

If you are thinking about sending me some e-mail that has a cutesy joke/ethnic prayer-or-good-luck-wish/shmaltzy story about courage or love, and at the end of said e-mail some form of the words “Send this e-mail to...” appear, then DO NOT SEND ME THIS E-MAIL. Because it will likely say “Send this to x number of friends” and once I get it, we will no longer be friends, thereby making the entire effort even more pointless.

Man, I hate these things more than Lazy Eye hates Fire Crotch.

I just got one from Kim, a friend and former co-worker. It reads as “An Irish Friendship Wish.” But at the end, it instructs me to send it to all my friends... the more I do, the faster my wish will come true. And there’s that final caveat...

“If you delete this after you read it, you will have 1 year of bad luck! But if you send it 2 of your friends you will automatically have 3 years of good luck!!!” Then there’s smiley faces or shamrocks or some shit.

Well, that’s just awesome. Personally 2006 hasn’t been that great of a year for McGone, and my friends know this. So thanks for the ominous instructions, Kim.

Can I bring the sender up on charges? Seriously, when you think about it, you are basically receiving a threat over your e-mail. If I don’t go through with their demands, something very awful will happen to me. “Annoy your friends with this e-mail or you’ll be hit by a bus! :)” Walks like a duck, talks like a duck. It’s a freakin’ duck.

So, if I may appropriate a bit from Mr. Stephen Colbert, to all you chain-lettering e-mailers...