Strange musings from the bakery
Forwarding ourselves right into economic hell

By David Baker

April 4, 2008 | I'm not a scientist, and God knows I'm not an expert on anything of importance -- that is, until classic rock and Judd Apatow productions become the measure of super-intelligence -- but I would have to think there's some sort of trend, some data, to show that the number of forwarded emails is inversely proportional to the value of the U.S. dollar and the health of the U.S. economy.

I pulled that statistics language from a deep, dark place, out from under Trivial Pursuit answers about women's tennis and the proper way to cook Brussels sprouts. So, I think it roughly translates to something like this: The more fat-ass, cubicle-dwelling Americans forward emails, the deeper the U.S. economy will fall into the vat of economic feces.

We've forwarded ourselves right past a downturn and headlong into recession.

That theory makes a lot of sense, right? Instead of filing whatever bull@#$% reports people have to file, they are forwarding cute emails about kittens in laundry hampers or wrinkly dogs next to toothless old men with matching jowls. I'm not sure about the ins and outs of how the economy works, but I would guess that somehow the busy work involved in filling out reports or making pie charts about earnings spins the economy's little hamster wheel, keeping this whole ship afloat. Talk about your mixed metaphors, that's bush league.

Crappy writing aside, if our working population worked for even half the time they are forwarding emails with hilarious billboards -- "There's room for all of God's creatures, right next to the mash potatoes." "We wouldn't stay in Kansas either." "My life is in shambles, but I still put on a good face and drive this Kia." You get the idea -- we could outproduce any country.

The only reason we keep outsourcing our work to all these places is because they either don't have the Internet, or don't have the bandwidth to send 75 jpegs of Santa Claus cartoons in the middle of July. We move our jobs to places that still think FWD means Front Wheel Drive. We give jobs to people who wouldn't understand redneck jokes, and certainly wouldn't think they're funny after the fifth read.

If you spend 30 minutes out of every hour reading and forwarding emails about old people farting, you are no doubt using at least seven minutes scrolling through all the names of the previous forwarders, another four minutes contemplating who to infect with this particular inbox parasite and five more minutes, before all that, sifting through all the offers for porn or erection pills to make the porn worth watching.

That leaves 14 minutes for actual non-forward-related work every hour. There are eight hours in a normal work day. People pee, let's say, three times a work day for five minutes a pee. So multiply 14 by eight and add 15 minutes for piss breaks, and you get ... 127 minutes out of the work day used for actual work. You can probably cut that number in half, with all the daydreaming about, or hitting on, the office hottie.

So in the average work day -- thanks to email forwarding -- a garden-variety American peon spends 64 minutes a day doing productive work. No wonder why the Yen and the Canadian dollar are kicking our ass. If we get a rash of funny panda sneezing videos or touching self-help emails with sparkling pink text, the Peso is going to catch up and then we're @#$%&*.

I'm an advocate of quiting forwarding cold turkey. The withdrawals will be hard, especially when the pictures of people who drove off with the gas nozzle still in their tank -- silly bastards. And I totally forgot z was a letter because it just took me five minutes to spell nozzle -- but it's important to be strong.

If you don't want to quit completely, and think you can be a moderate to light forwarder, here's a couple, time-saving tips:

- Anything with the words "hilarious," "very funny" or "hoot" -- by the way, who says hoot anymore? -- won't be funny, probably not even giggle-worthy.

- I assure you that you've seen all the possible ways to dress up pets. Dogs in T-shirts are just disturbing -- not for the dog, but for the whack job that put said dog into a T-shirt. Same goes for cats, guinea pigs, goats, Siberian tigers and salamanders.

- Unless you're writing a political blog, you can't possibly top the insensitivity and narrow-mindedness of any forward with a political bend.

- Stay away from the religious stuff with all the happy angel sounds and tear-jerker endings. I'm not saying God doesn't exist, because I think he does, but the existence of forwarding makes me question his omnipotence. If he was all-knowing, he would have nipped this whole forwarding business in the bud -- maybe even written it in the 10 Commandments. Either way, I'm sure God is staunchly anti-forwards, at least my version is.

- Anything with more than one FW or FWD tacked onto the front of the subject line probably has enough viruses to make your computer implode into a puff of dust. These things are like the toothless hookers of the email world, under no circumstances do you want to -- I really can't finish that, it would get taken out anyways. Use your imagination.

The most disappointing thing for me is that the forward has started to take over my text message inbox, as well. Is there no safe haven?

At least with all the text message ones I've been getting a lot of boobs, of late. And when it comes to naked women and dead animals with big antlers, I'll forward that stuff to everyone I know. No questions asked.

MS
MS