Frugal Intuition

Today’s post doesn’t have much do to with saving money. Well, depending on how prone you are to believing the forwards that land in your inbox, I suppose it could, but I’m thinking about this more in terms of time savers and courtesy. Forwards are, as far as I’m concerned, one of the banes of email. To me they are just a lazy person’s way of sending some communication and say to me “You aren’t important enough to me to actually take the time to write a personalized and real letter.” Call me old fashioned if you will. Now I’m willing to admit that some of the ones out there are pretty darn funny or cute (I have a weakness for cute puppy and kitty pictures), and those aren’t the ones I’m talking about today. No, the ones I want to talk about are the ludicrous, alarmist forwards that proclaim that there’s some huge computer virus coming, that if some dude approaches you in the parking lot of the mall and tries to give you a business card the drugs on it will absorb instantly into your system and knock you out so that you can be kidnapped and brutalized, etc. My mom sends these to me all the time, and it drives me NUTS.

So for those of you who aren’t already familiar, I want to introduce you to Snopes.com. Snopes is this really awesome website where you can actually verify the truth of the rumors running rampant on the internet. Whenever my mother or someone else sends me a forward (assuming I haven’t deleted it without reading in the first place), I immediately check it out here, then reply to sender that the claim in the forward is bogus (100% of the ones I’ve ever gotten are). Sometimes there’s a grain of truth to them. The one she sent me yesterday (which prompted this post) was about a drug recall. It was alarmist, in big, bold, red font claiming that there was a drug recall on a long list of OTC medications containing some chemical I can’t even pronounce. The forward claimed it had been verified by Snopes and you should pay attention. Naturally, I went to check it out. And color me surprised, it was a legitimate drug recall…

8 years ago. As it turns out, there were methodological issues related to the study that the FDA based the recall on and the risk was incredibly low.

This idiot forward has been making the rounds of the internet, cluttering up people’s inboxes, wasting their time for EIGHT YEARS. Now add that kind of time to all the OTHER forwards out there and you start to realize what an incredible TIME SUCK forwards are. Even if you don’t read them, they take time to delete. So do us all a favor and don’t send them. Or if you do feel compelled to share one of these, take a moment to check that it’s a legitimate claim before wasting anybody else’s time and adding to the general hysteria.