Pet Peeve

(One of my pet peeves is that I don't like the phrase "Pet Peeve" but I don't have time to think of another in its place. )

I have an information/email pet peeve. I have a few friends, not many, who like to send out emails that warn me of certain health issues or political issues or religious issues or educational issues. I love information, mind you. I like learning and altering my views if they are wrong and I do like discussion and even a good argument if I think we'll learn something along the way...I'm all for information!

But some of these emails are not true. If something sounds fishy to me - I mean, they all have that "trying to sound professional and accurate, but are just this side of cheesy" sound - I research it on the net and see what I can find. Sometimes snopes or that urban legend site clearly disprove the exact email. Often they will give a link that explains the origin or the facts.

So, sometimes if I'm perturbed enough, I'll reply to the email and say, "Here's a link that says this isn't true." People don't seem to like this. Sure, they can push the send button and alert us to a terrible freezing plastic water bottles warning, but if we tell them that there is no cause for panic, they get put off! What is that? Do these people want to be afraid? Do they want us all to avoid freezing plastic water bottles, for some reason?

Once I really aggravated a friend who loves to send these things when I hit "reply all" and sent the snopes link. Oooo. She was mad, mad, mad. She told me that her mother doesn't need any more reason to hate Bush and I shouldn't have given her that information. Well, I wasn't giving her "hate Bush" information, I was just saying that the email sent to us wasn't true. My friend read the snopes thing and didn't agree with that at all, which is fine, I don't care. But why do these people think they can essentially march into my mailbox with a one-sided argument and shut the door behind them, disallowing me to speak back? And how come it's okay to vastly send out wrong, lopsided information? And why are we jerks when we point out that these sometimes harmful emails are wrong? Anyway, I apologized to my friend and told her that I didn't want to hurt her, I just thought that people shouldn't be given questionable information as fact. Furthermore, she should allow her mother to believe what she believes and certainly not send her faulty information in order to sway her political opinion!

So, that's my pet peeve. Bad information, sent by the mailbox-full, to friends by friends, under the guise of being helpful. Be really helpful and check out the information before you hit send!