The dangers of e-mail

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Ryan Chirnomas

But no, I managed to work out about the most inconvenient schedule possible for myself this semester. In addition to the ever-so-refreshing 8 a.m. class, and an evening class that prevents me from watching The Simpsons every Tuesday and Thursday, I was also able to work a few hour-long gaps into my schedule.

So what to do with all this dead time? Perhaps go to the Fig to grab breakfast, or flip through the Wildcat hoping for an entertaining Police Beat. But after eating my recommended daily amount of gruel, and reading about a bunch of boring bike thefts, I've still got plenty of time to kill. Enough time to go check my e-mail at the library.

Greeted by "You have eight new messages," I fire up the computer to see what the good ol' information superhighway has for me. And there, spelled out plainly in black and green, is the pathetic result of millions of dollars of computer technology: an e-mail from my mom, three messages from the honors center (of course, none of these ultra-specific announcements apply to me - that is, unless I'm a female African-American finance sophomore born on the third Tuesday of April), and four cute little forwards.

For me, the letters "fwd" are essentially the equal to the letters "del." But in my deleterious endeavors, I've managed to assemble an analysis of e-mail forwards, as there are only four types.

First, my all-time favorite: the get-rich-quick scheme. In this genre of forwards, all you have to do is pass a message on to a few friends and you get big bucks from Disney, Microsoft or some other high-profile Fortune 500 company. Your bounty for such exhaustive efforts is a fat check from Michael Eisner himself in the neighborhood of $5,000 or so. Don't believe it? Between the masses of addresses are personal messages from real people with such encouraging messages as "I called Disney this morning. It's totally true!" Right. I suppose the check's in the mail.

Then there's the joke forward. I guess this one is the least annoying of all, but no column about forwards would be complete without it. If you have the patience to scroll through five pages of names and "read this, it's funny" comments, you may find that there's actually a joke buried in there somewhere. With any luck, it doesn't have anything to do with a certain president and a certain Cuban tobacco product. But I'd bet my five grand from Microsoft that it does.

Next, we have perhaps the most captivating species of forwards, the picture forward. Somewhere out there in cyberspace, some obsessed psychopath decided to spend a few days making a picture of Mr. Potato Head out of dashes, slashes and parenthesis.

Or worse, I once received an e-mail called "A Thousand Smiles." Basically, it consisted of those smiley faces made out of a colon and a parenthesis. A thousand times. Well, at least I assume it was a thousand times. It's possible that there were only 999 smiles, but who's counting?

Finally, you get to interact in our last genre of forward. Just in case you forgot to pick up this month's copy of Teen Beat, the Internet brings the tests and quizzes to you by the dozen. You know the kind. Assign one person you know to each of five colors, five barnyard animals and five breakfast cereals and eureka! The magic of the Internet has professed who will be your soulmate and who will be your arch-nemesis.

To the best of my understanding, the Internet was started about 30 years ago by the U.S. military in an effort to more efficiently kill Russians. Hundreds of megahertz, thousands of megabytes and millions of dollars later, the best we can do with it is send each other text-pictures of Papa Smurf and jokes about sex scandals. Just make sure to send them to 10 or more of your friends, or the bad karma demons of the Internet will plague you with a crappy schedule next semester.

Ryan Chirnomas is a molecular and cellular biology senior and can be reached via e-mail at Ryan.Chirnomas@wildcat.arizona.edu. His column, In Hasselhoff We Trust, appears every Monday.