Tuesday, March 20, 2007

What's the polite way to say "I don't care and leave me alone"?

You have to know people like this. I know I'm not alone on this one. I have more than one, and I can only expect to collect more as my life progresses. A relative, a family friend, an acquaintance you don't really like, or whatever who sends you e-mail forwards and videos or pictures that you have no interest in reading or watching. The good ones are the ones that just assume you read them (or don't) and leave their e-mail universe separate from the real one. The people I am talking about, though, are the ones who insist on following up by asking, "Did you see the _____ I sent you?"

I hate those people. Even though they are my family, I don't think I'm being unfair. I'm not a picture person, and anything that you guarantee is hilarious probably isn't. If it was, I'd have heard of it by now. I don't really care that your nephew dressed up as an Irish Abe Lincoln for St. Patrick's Day. I don't want you to send me inspirational forwards. I don't want to read internet jokes in my e-mail. If the jokes were good, they would be told by comedians for money not passed around by jerks like you for free on the internet.

The tricky part is that it's hard to tell them to stop sending them to me. They're relatives or friends who think they're doing me a favor by sharing something great with me. But, the sad thing is, it's not great and it's more an inconvenience than a favor for me. I don't want to be a jerk about it, but really, I think somebody needs to be a jerk to these people. Don't get me wrong, I think pictures involving cats are hilarious, but kittens hugging puppies doesn't do it for me. I'm a dude. I want to see a kitten removing some chick's bra. That'd hilarious.

I think that's really the problem with generally nice people. They want to be helpful, so it's not like they're being obnoxious on purpose. Or maybe it's a problem with people who have bad senses of humor; it doesn't matter. I still hate it. The moral of the story is stop sending me forwards.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

FW: Bah.

I had to ask a friend of mine to stop sending me his forwards. He would go for several days without checking his e-mail and then all of a sudden I'd get 10-20 forwarded e-mails of that nature. And some weeks (months) he would send 5-10 every day. Ugh, some times I wondered if he read the ones he sent as the subject lines matched everyone once in a while. Sigh...if only people realized that I've been on the net for a decade now so I've seen just about everything there is to see.

Anonymous said...

What a second, I send you pictures all the time... darn.