Remember the good ol’ days of the internet? The days before endless numbers of spam e-mails about penis enlargements or from Nigerian princes? (Or about penis enlargements for Nigerian princes? I mean, they have to invest those millions somewhere, right?) When life was simpler and people were so unsavvy that you actually had to explain what an e-mail address and that funny little @—the symbol without a real English name, but a surprisingly interesting history—actually meant?
Yes, in that long, bygone era (not even a generation ago …), about the only thing to worry about on the internet were the silly chain e-mails that your well-meaning, but still occasionally annoying friends and relatives would send around. You remember the ones.
“This e-mail has been around the world seven times. Keep it going!”
“Alanis forwarded this e-mail on to four friends and won the lottery the very next day. Nigel threw it in the trash and is now sweeping Alanis’ floors for less than minimum wage.”
With time and increasing internet sophistication on our parts, you’d think that these chain e-mails would long be a thing of the past. Unfortunately, however, admin types everywhere have kept this beloved tradition alive for us to cherish like hearing two cats mating at three in the morning. It would be nice if the e-mails actually had some societal relevance like being around the world seven times or some harsh consequences for the Nigels out there, but sadly we don’t even get that.
The whole premise behind this nonsense is that some important person way up in the institutional hierarchy gets the urge to write a memo to some less important people way down in the hierarchy. But, instead of sending it to them directly, it has to go down the whole admin chain of command first (so, a double chain letter then), bumping its headers on every rung of the ladder along the way. I’ve literally gotten e-mails within my University where its twisted, convoluted journey was something along the lines of:
- VP for Student Affairs
- My Faculty
- The Dean for Student Affairs in my Faculty
- My Institute
- Me as a teacher
So not exactly seven times around the world, but nearly seven levels of admin. Close enough.
I know this because each unwilling recipient of the e-mail habitually just forwards it on to the next equally unwilling victim without bothering to remove any of their footprints. As a result, any given e-mail literally starts to crumble under its own weight with all the headers and repeated references to “please pass this on”. (When you stop to consider that an e-mail is really only composed of electrons and that electrons weigh next to nothing (as in on the order of 10-31 kg of next to nothing), you know how many headers we’re talking about here for there to be any weight to crumble under.) In the end, you have to scroll down for three days just to discover that the original message was simply “Please read the attached memo.”
(The “best” chain e-mail that I have ever received from my University here in Not-Bielefeld—and I am not making this one up—was one that limped its way down from above to (eventually) announce that the postal seal for the Karlruhe Institute of Technology had been updated recently because someone had stolen the old one.
Possibly a bit of urgent news for someone at my University, definitely not for most. The only things about this particular e-mail that interested me are what evil genius hatched up this nefarious plot for world domination and, more to the point, why. Unfortunately, these actually useful bits of information were not included in the e-mail, just what the new seals looked like, which, many, many years after the fact, still remain the first and only time that I’ve ever set eyes upon them.)
And, despite most the information in these chain e-mails usually being about as important as new postal seals, I nevertheless invest the three days worth of scrolling, just to make sure that I don’t end up like poor Nigel …
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