You Know Who You Are

There are two kinds of people in this world. Those who “Forward” and those who don’t. We’re talking email, of course, and the battle lines are drawn.

It’s not unlike the Civil War. Brother against brother. Friend against friend.
It is high-risk for forwarders. One too many jokes about politics and it’s a w.w.w. duel to the cyber-death. Soon you’re nothing more than a sender blocked forever.

My parents are prolific forwarders. That’s redundant, of course. All forwarders are prolific. It’s their nature. One day scientists will discover a gene that explains forwarding. Not surprisingly, it will be found next to the “Reply All” gene.

Before the Technological Age, I actually received letters from my parents. Occasionally, those letters would be taped to a tin of homemade cookies. The letters would be chatty. Sometimes they’d enclose a clipped-out cartoon with my dad’s two word comments in the margin. “You! Ha!”

That’s all dried up since the advent of email. I really miss the cookies.

Times have changed and so have mom and dad. Now I get forwards on every subject imaginable: animated jokes involving saggy body parts, amazing places that look amazingly photoshopped, remedies to cure everything they think is wrong with me, tearjerker PowerPoints that induce gagging, videos of puppies and kittens and car crashes. You know, just the usual.

All from my parents.

So if you were wondering what the retired people of America are doing right this very minute, wonder no more. They are scouring YouTube for cute clips to send you.

I have to pay attention because I will be quizzed. Ten minutes after the little ping of Outlook Express, the phone will ring. “Did you see that email I sent you?”

Before I can even stammer that I’m not always glued to my computer checking stock prices and playing Spider Solitaire, which happens to be exactly what I’m doing when they call, I get the lecture.

“You didn’t read it, did you? That was important information. I’m never going to send you anything again.”

Go ahead; try to lie to your mom that you never received it. It won’t work for two reasons. Number one: it’s extremely difficult to fib to a woman sitting in her rocking chair, because you know that little gray-haired woman is packing heat.

Ok, it’s the heat coming off the laptop she’s cradling like a grandchild, but with about two gigabytes of RAM—that’s a lot of firepower to make your life miserable. Number two: the woman no longer works for a living. That means she’s got nothing but time to research where exactly that little email ended up.

Then I’ll hear about how my father figured out how to tell when the recipient opens the email. Geez. I haven’t been a teenager for decades and they are still spying on me!

So it’s better to just admit I hit delete as soon as I see the subject line: “Vitamin B Cures Irritability!” Five minutes later, there’s a forward about ungrateful baby boomer children in my inbox.

My parents have never shown favorites. My sisters’ mailboxes get flooded as well. Often all three of us are designated “Undisclosed Recipient.” That’s always a warning flag for something I don’t want to read.

One sister won’t tell them her office email. Like that will work. My dad is better than the CIA at digging up our personal information from the web. She thinks she’s safe. But one day she’ll log on and there will be a rhyming poem about Wonderful Women Who Love Chocolate and instructions to pass it on to ten wonderful women…

She might as well give her two weeks notice.

My other sister is braver than we are. She flat-out told mom and dad to stop sending her forwards. Hey, if she was willing to start a family war, then I was willing to duck in the crossfire. But I must say it’s a lot easier to be brave when you live in San Diego and don’t need The Forwarders to pick up the kids for you occasionally.

Then my dad asked me to forward a message to my sister. Something about plastic in the microwave, I figure. I now must choose. Father or sister. North or South. What do I do?

I know. I’ll send it to a stranger. It will circumnavigate the globe in 22 minutes and be in my sister’s mailbox 642 forwards later. She will never know it was from me.

You owe me, Dad.