Compulsive Forwarders

I get mostly two kinds of email: spam, and messages that look like this:

FWD: YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS ITS SO CUTE!!!!!!!
FWD: SIGN THIS PETITION OR BIBLE ILLEGAL!!!!!!
FWD: DONT DELETE THIS ONE!!!!!! KITTENS!!!!!!!
FWD: JESUS COMING NEXT FRIDAY 3:23 PACIFIC STANDARD TIME!!!!!!!

Lousy grammar and punctuation aside, I hate these. Honestly. I hate them worse than spam, because there is an outside chance that I may have won a $100 Macy’s gift card out of the blue, even though I’ve never darkened the door of Macy’s in my life. On the other hand, there is no chance in hell (except in hell, I should say) that the Bible is in danger of being outlawed.

And I’ll bet my kids’ college savings that the Lord will be a no-show on Friday afternoon.

Believe it or not—and if you have email, you will believe it—these inbox anathemas are forwarded from some of the people I love most in this world. They come from my dearest friends, and from my relatives—my own flesh and blood. It is hard to imagine that these people, who share my life experiences and my DNA, are thrilled each day to find their inboxes full of impersonal forwards. Not only do these forwards delight them to no end, they are salivating to pass them on me, and they are positive that these e-screeds will make my day (FWD: A SMILE FOR U!!!!!!!). However, I do not share their enthusiasm. I react to these same forwards as if they are an infestation of lice crawling out of my keyboard onto the monitor. In four years, I have received only a handful of forwards that I found interesting. One was about a guy who does 3-D sidewalk art. Another pictured families around the world with a week's worth of their groceries. The German family consumed the equivalent of $60,000 a year in food; $10K a year in German beer alone. Dear ol' Vater had the belly to prove it.

But 99 forwards out of 100 are only good for deleting, and I get so many of them that the spammers are fighting for inbox space. In fact, deleting them all every day could give you carpal tunnel syndrome. They are cheesy at best, ridiculous at worst. I have a secret name for those who fill my inbox with this rot. I call them Compulsive Forwarders (CFs). It is not uncommon for me to get 3-5 of these per day from each of the same individuals, 365 days a year, every subject line with multiple explanation points, screaming for my attention.

This maddening phenomenon is almost enough to make me interrogate friends and relatives before giving out my email address: “Are you, by any chance, a compulsive forwarder of any and all electronic trash that finds its way into your mailbox?” Are you overly intimate with that “Send to All” button?” This would be futile, I suspect. Judging from their subject lines, my offending contacts are unaware that they have forwarding issues. CFs never dream that anyone would be irritated by all of their forwards—that they are, to be explicit, just too forward. No, they are discriminating; they are selective—or so they think. These forwards are important. To wit, “FWD: THIS IS AWESOME DONT DELETE!!!!!!!”

Indeed, some folks send me every forward which they, in turn, receive from compulsive forwarders, whether these forwards consist of photos of two-headed albino macaws or newsflashes about the End Times. Since my friends and relations naturally share many of my friends and relations, I often get three or four copies of the same forward: a multiplicity of must-see macaws and an avalanche of approaching Armageddons. Let me re-alliterate: many of my kith and kin are forwarding freaks.

Can anything be done about this? I don’t think so. To begin with, there is no way to distinguish a CF from a normal person before disclosing your email address. From outward appearances, you would no more foresee my friends and kinfolks forwarding garbage-by-the-gig than you would imagine them mainlining cocaine in seedy bars. My CF loved ones are, if anything, rather shy and reserved in public. It is only when they are empowered with internet access that they brazenly flood everybody else’s inboxes with whatever crap they find in their own. Lately, their forwards contain gigantic images, usually of animals or celestial beings, that go on for screens and screens. They play tinkly tunes, making me scramble frantically for the volume control. You can scroll down forever and never reach the end of these forwards. Maybe, subconsciously, I need to see the first kid-on-a-pony, accompanied by what sounds like a monkey playing a xylophone. Don't my nearest and dearest realize that sixteen kids on ponies are more than I, or anyone, needs to see?

Secondly, it’s not only impossible to predict which of my friends or relatives will turn out to be a compulsive forwarder, but it’s also impossible, once I land on a CF’s contact list, to do anything to remedy the situation. I cannot simply block a CF’s email outright, or she will approach me downtown and ask whether I got her kid’s graduation picture, and then I will have to lie—“Oh! Yes! Didn’t she look great!—only to be icily reminded that the happy graduate is male.

Moreover, I cannot ask the CFs—even with great care and diplomacy—to delete me from "send to all." When I broached the subject with one compulsive forwarder, I seriously damaged a friendship. The reason? This friend objected that she was only trying to “keep in touch” and “encourage me.” For you rank heathens who are certainly hell-bound, let me explain. In evangelical Christian circles, it is taboo to rebuff someone who is trying to “encourage” you. Ever. Even if the “encouragement” consists of a 70,000 kilobyte message containing a really ugly angel, twelve puppies in sunglasses, a virus alert, and yet another petition against removing God from the pledge of allegiance.

So: unless I become a hermit and opt out of the Electronic Age completely, I am helpless to stem the FWD tide. The ubiquitous "FWD:" is the price we all pay for having: a) a computer and b) an email account and c) friends and relatives who want to use email to “keep in touch.”

Let me digress for a minute. I mentioned my dear readers who are hell-bound heathens in the paragraph-before-last. I wonder: what kind of forwards do CF agnostics and atheists beam out into cyberspace?

FWD: CHRIS HITCHENS ARRESTED BY CIA DETAINED AT GITMO CASTRATED!!!!!!
FWD: DARWINS ORIG. PAPERS BURNED BY FUNDIES!!!!!
FWD: LOOK! ADORABLE KITTENS!!!!!!!!!

The kittens are pretty much inescapable, regardless of one’s religious or political persuasion. The kittens that have landed uninvited in my inbox would fill a transport truck, and every last one of them is the most adorable kitten ever, and I cannot live without seeing it.

Perhaps, if I am ever to be rid of—or at least resigned to—this kitten curse, I need to understand it. What is driving the CF to forward, and forward, and forward? Whence cometh this deep-seated delusion that recipients want and need a hundredth “cute” JPEG or a thousandth slice of religious hysteria? What deep human need does compulsive forwarding satisfy? Is this what passes for friendship in the 21st century?

If we analyze my friend’s protest—that she was only trying to “keep in touch” and “encourage me” with her tidal waves of forwarded junk email—we may find some answers, or at least some clues to the CF mystery. Compulsive forwarding is a free, split-second way to “touch base” with a “network” of people whom the CF assumes are “in his corner” on religion, politics, angels, kittens, and freaks of nature. “FWD:” the CF screams, “YOU WILL LOVE THIS!!!!!!” Such confidence. I know you, he is saying, and you know me. We are one. You will not delete my offerings; to delete them is to delete me, to refuse my “encouragement,” to cut off community. Some recipients may be annoyed—or in my case, driven up the wallpaper—but the CF has connected, passed the torch, and made sure that the adorable, or alarmist, message will endure.

Never mind that if Jesus is coming Friday afternoon, we shouldn’t be wasting time on computers in the first place. We—and by we, I mean you—ought to be repenting while there’s still time. Yes, repenting in sackcloth and ashes. Repenting of gluttony, lust, murder, mayhem—and that transgression of transgressions, that sin of sins: compulsive forwarding. Yes, I’m talking to you. By all that’s sacred, in the name of the thirteenth angel GIF from the bottom, spare me. I love you dearly, but keep the kittens to yourself.