Introducing Head to Desk since 2003

[dawn_felagund]

Yesterday, I came into work to find my inbox full. Well, relatively full, for me, since I don't get a lot of email at work. There has been a spam email going around the agency, one of those that promises that Bill Gates will pay you $245 per person you forward the email to. (This one!) Well, some employee, in a fit of "intelligence," managed to wrap his brain around the mathematics of $245 times the thousand or so people employed by DPSCS and decided to forward the email to every single person in the email address book.

Which, predictably, resulted in others jumping on the bandwagon and clicking Reply All to share in the bounty.

Someone replied to all with the Snopes article about the email.

Someone replied to him (using Reply All, of course), saying, "You better hope you're right!" I mean, gosh, if he's not, he stands to lose out on a quarter million dollars at least!

Finally, someone from IT replied and reminded all of the enthusiastic and soon-to-be-rich and -retired participants in the scam scheme that it violated department policy to use the email system for non-work-related purposes, and all the forwards flying around to everyone in the address book was really taxing the system.

Not like that stopped the email. Next, people started replying (to all, of course), asking to be removed from "the list" or griping about spam. The fact that they themselves had become spammers by their love of that Reply All option amused me but apparently failed to sink past those three inches or so of bone to reach the quivering, jellied mass that stands for a brain.

It perturbs me that these people are considered professionals.

It perturbs me even more that we are the Department of Public Safety, and the same people who will be eagerly checking their mailbox for the next few weeks, looking for that check from Bill Gates, are the same who make decisions about which offenders are and are not allowed back into the community.

There's a comforting thought.

Comments

[hrymfaxe.livejournal.com]

I would write back “Shame on you,”

Am adopting that answer! :D

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

Feel free to do so. Just remember that people can be very delicate and irrational about these kinds of things! Superstition seems to be hardwired into the psyche of a lot of people.

[hrymfaxe.livejournal.com]

I solemnly swear to use it with caution and delicacy. ;)

[dawn_felagund]

Superstition seems to be hardwired into the psyche of a lot of people.

It does, doesn't it? I wonder if there is an evolutionary explanation for that. *looks around for Pandemonium*

[pandemonium-213.livejournal.com]

Superstition and magical thinking* certainly do seem to be hard-wired into our brains. Conveniently enough, in the midst of blogging about Dawkins' The God Delusion, I wrote about "natural born dualism" and the human predisposition to believe in the supernatural a while back:

The Accidental Deity and in particular, Is God an Accident? contained therein.**

The late (and great) Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan's book, The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark addresses the problems of superstition nicely. Sagan's approach is also less shrill than Dick to the Dawk's is.

*Not that magical thinking or imagination is bad. In fact, it's probably good and necessary for our brain function. One just needs to know where the boundaries are.

**Disclaimer: I acknowledge my (lack of) belief system may be as popular as Sauron at a hobbit picnic (yes, I am inordinately fond of this stupid phrase) in some circles.

[dawn_felagund]

Thanks so much for the links. I've spent the last hour reading them--fascinating stuff!

This discussion is kind of serendipitous because I am currently working on my final essay for American Fiction and looking at Poe's use of psychology in his short stories; one of the points in my thesis regards dualism: that the psychology in Poe's stories not only represents but requires dualist beliefs to work. I got to go back to some of my old psych texts in providing some background on this and found a statement along the same lines as Bloom's research that "everyone begins as a dualist." This has always made intuitive sense to me; it's fascinating to see the science underlying the idea.

[dawn_felagund]

Hi, Talban ...

0;^)))

[hrymfaxe.livejournal.com]

Why hello there!

[dawn_felagund]

That was really quick!

My Nelyo sees your Talban. ;)

(My Talban would be all over my Nelyo, but that's a whole different story ...)

*behaving now*

[hrymfaxe.livejournal.com]

ROFL! I only have one image of Talban so he has to be King, Queen and Ace in this game. ;)

Please don't behave! ;)

[dawn_felagund]

talban has his own LJ from when digdigil and I used to RP my Midhavens characters. There are lots of images there that Jenni used to use for him, though Caspian is much closer to my own own mental image. ;)

Bobby and I RP my characters sometimes. (We call it "character development.") Tal is a world-class perv. Someday, I'm going to actually finish the stories, and everyone will be disappointed in how un-pervy Talban really is! ;)

[hrymfaxe.livejournal.com]

Yeah you have to be careful with your flist, because we all have dirty minds and there is no one around to stop us. :D *goes to look at his lj* And also - Caspian and his horse were the contenders for the most pleasing eye-candy in that movie. I debated with myself all the way through. ;)

Oh speaking of icons! That one you have with the magnificent seven, is it one that is snaggable?

[dawn_felagund]

Caspian and his horse were the contenders for the most pleasing eye-candy in that movie.

Wot? No Peter Pevensie?? I often think that if we had Ben Barnes and William Moseley for Tolkien characters, there would be no stopping the deluge of slash communities! >;^)))

Oh speaking of icons! That one you have with the magnificent seven, is it one that is snaggable?

Yes! Just please credit aramel_calawen; she put it up for grabs a few years ago. :)

[hrymfaxe.livejournal.com]

Thanks! *uses it immediately!*

Oh LOL! Now you make me want to look if there is any Peter/Caspian out there... ;) Because you are so right!

[dawn_felagund]

I've never gotten the impression that there was a big Narnia fandom. I could be wrong on that ... but if there is, they're very quiet.

And I'm sure, given the overtness of Christianity in the Narnia books compared to Tolkien's, that slash is even more taboo than here. >:^)))

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

Tal is a world-class perv.

OK. Shame on you. Now you've hooked me. I want to read those!

[dawn_felagund]

The Midhavens stories or RPs? The stories will be finished eventually. I'm not sure if any of the RPs are publicly available or not.