"This is a chain letter. This chain letter was started by six nuns in Pakistan in 1942 and has NEVER BEEN BROKEN! If you break this chain letter you will have BAD LUCK! One man in Saskatoon broke the chain and a week later his dog died, his wife left him, and an elephant peed on his head. Then there was a woman in Kentucky who died in a mysterious incident involving a tractor and a penguin just two days after she threw away her chain letter. And don't forget Judge Reinhold who threw away his chain letter and tripped and fell onto his head five days letter. DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU!!!!!!
If you do send the chain letter, all kinds of good stuff will happen to you! People have won the lottery, married supermodels, and much, much more! All you have to do is rewrite this letter exactly as written twelve times and send it to all your friends. Add your name to the list below and in six days you will receive a million postcards from all over the world!"
Now, I have heard of a few sorts of chain letters that are actually useful, such as one for recipes my mom did. But as you can see from the example above, most of them are a bunch of bullshit. The level of stupidity it takes to write a chain letter is astronomical. I don't think that the writers even think about the logic of what they're writing.
I've always wondered why so many of them start out saying that a group of nuns started the chain letter, either nuns or elementary school kids- it's never, "hey, we're a bunch of jerks who started this just to piss people off!" I suppose they say that to make the letter sound legitimate, but let's face it, why would a bunch of nuns start writing a chain letter? Don't they have better things to do, like feeding the poor? And if the letter is constantly being copied (since 1942, it says- even noticed how all chain letters have supposedly gone on for forty or fifty years?), is that exactly how the nuns wrote it in 1942? In that case, how do they know that it's never been broken? And usually after you read that the chain has never been broken, you read about some people who DID break the chain and they died or something. Again, how do those nuns know these things? Especially since they wrote this in 1942, when no one had even received the chain letter yet!
And why are these nuns trying to scare us into writing these letters? That's a real nunnish thing to do, threaten people! I suppose that after all those people broke the chain, the nuns had to get real tough to get people to write. I had to write a lot of chain letters as a child. Every time one of my friends happened to get a chain letter, she'd go, "Oh, Jen, puh-leeze write the chain letter or else I'll die! Please!" and she'd keep at it until I agreed to fill the stupid things out. I never received any postcards, and none of us ever married supermodels or won the lottery either.
Then the nuns want you to handwrite them half the time, just to make it more difficult. And you have to send them to a bunch of your friends. Well, who do the nuns think sent you the chain letter in the first place? Your friends, who already wrote theirs! So whom do YOU send them to? These chain letters have broken up a lot of friendships. And for what? A chance to get a whole lot of mail? Most of them are for postcards (although half the ones I ever got would be about postcards and never mention that you had to send one to anybody. So how is anybody supposed to get any postcards?), but you never do get the amount of postcards promised (you'll get one). Why, you ask? Because there are a lot of people out there who have gotten fed up with the whole chain letter thing and who trashed theirs.
THE E-MAIL CHAIN LETTER.
In a way they're an improvement over the traditional version- you don't spend any money or waste stamps.
There are varying forms of the e-mail chain letter.
There are the good-luck ones. "Here is a good luck animal to help you on your exams. Send this to five people and you will get A's." When I get these I think, "Nice thought, but I don't think that'll work." I also wonder who's spent this much time drawing all that stuff. Or the thousand happy faces one. It brought up a few questions for me when I saw it.
1. Who spends that much time making happy faces?
2. Were they trying to put off writing a paper?
3. Has anyone counted to see if there are really a thousand happy faces?
4. Was that person also trying to put off writing a paper?
The crackpot ones (or the ones that say that if you don't send them to fifteen people in the next five minutes you'll never have sex again) really piss me off,. My ex-roommate got a lot of these. She got one that 'proved' Bill Gates was the devil. She's even gotten a religious chain letter!
But the worst ones that I've seen are the medical ones. These e-mails from a doctor (doctors have nothing better to do than send out chain letters?) for some nameless dying child saying its last wish is to send this chain letter promoting peace/love. Then it says that you are an evil sick heartless person if you don't send it to fifty people. And it also says that for every person who sends it on, some charity gets a buck. I'd like to know HOW the charity would even KNOW who got the chain letter in the first place! These letters just smack of BS and insult me to boot.
But I finally got a chain letter that beat all chain letters. I've had to cut some of it for length, but here are the good parts.
The following is not a real chain letter. Its writer composed it after reading one too many chains, and finding that they are all basically the same.This letter was composed by a little boy in Balaklavia who is dying from lung cancer due to second hand smoke and drunk driving. Please forward this letter to as many people as you can, so that this little starving boy with no arms can get one last wish... To annoy as many people as possible with e-mail. Please, for every time this mail gets sent, 3 cents will be donated to the Save-The-Starving-Little-Balaklavian-Boy-With-No-Arms Fund. Really. There is no realistic way that all the mails can be counted, but hey, if you don't send this anyway, you're selfish and you're going straight to hell. Or maybe you'll come back in YOUR next life as a little Balaklavian boy with no arms.
Send this letter to as many people as you can.
If you send it to...
1 person -- 1 person will be pissed at you for sending another dumb chain letter
5 people -- 5 people will be pissed at you for sending another dumb chain letter
10 people -- 10 people will be pissed at you for sending another dumb chain letter
15 people -- 15 people will be pissed at you for sending another dumb chain letter
20 people -- 20 people will be pissed at you for sending another dumb chain letter
30 people -- 30 people will be pissed at you for sending another dumb chain letter
35 people -- 35 people will be pissed at you for sending another dumb chain letter
40 people -- Your crush will ask you out on a date.
41 people -- Your crush will ask you to have sex with him/her on Sesame Street.
43 people -- Your crush will die, and be replaced with a new, better looking crush.
44 1/2 people -- Your crush will crush you with a huge boulder, and you'll get sick twisted jollies out of it.
47 people -- Your crush will mutate and grow an extra arm, which he/she will use to perform bizarre sex acts on you.You MUST send at least 300 copies of this letter. If you don't an evil curse will be put on you.
For instance, John Fargo of Fargo, PA deleted this mail as soon as he got it. Then he got up, called a friend, and went to a movie, because he has a life.
Or how about Lenore Poe, of Tromaville, who deleted this mail when she got it? She got into her car... and drove to work.
Or take poor Mr. Arnold Cartman, who accidentally only sent part of this letter to his crush. He died. So did his crush. Of course, that was because of all of the STDs. (They worked on Sesame Street.)Please send this letter to all your loser hacker friends. The little Balaklavian boy with no arms needs your help.
Remember, as the Spice Girls once said, "I wanna really really really wanna zig a zig ah." Think about it.