Free Lunch: Lunch at $5 Only!!!
I received an email from a couple of old acquaintances which is a forward forwarded with the oldest attachment dated back to 18 July 2005 which reads:
Dear Friends,
... Bill Gates is sharing his fortune... ignore this... repent later. ..... To make sure that Internet Explorer remains the most widely used program, Microsoft and AOL are running an e-mail beta test... Forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (if you are a Microsoft Windows user) for a two week time period. For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you $245.00, for every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every third person that receives it, you will be paid $241.00. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a cheque.
Thereafter followed a myriad of frenzied testimonies from people receiving their monies expressing their unbounded ecstasy.
One testimony read: "I forwarded this mail to three chaps just half an hour back and I just forgot about it.. then I saw my salary slip, checked my account in(sic) the net. I was wonderstuck(sic) to see $30000/- added to my account!! transferred from ms(sic) office thru western money transfer !!! Its amazing guys !!!
Hello? Knock knock. Anyone home? Is the light on?
The loopholes are as large as a gaping cavity (just read the above paragraphs again if you haven't found one) I thought no one would fall for it... but by Judas' toes, I scrolled down the mail and rows upon rows upon rows of people have been forwarding this message to their poor unsuspecting friends, who in turn will forward it to their friends and so on!!! Many of them justify this with the "Well, no harm trying...." statement.
Ahem, so I wrote back to these same acquaintances since they had pissed me off in the past anyway and this was to be my glorious chance to lecture them on their naivety and gave me a momentary high of feeling like a genius. I mean, c'mon, Microsoft is a public traded company with shareholders and board of directors and Bill Gates doing this impractical test is akin to admitting himself to a mental institute. Also, it is technically impossible to track forwarded email and no company does business this way. And third, look at the loopholes.
I have in the past received many more emails where people hoping to get free iPods (that damn gadget!), free monies, free hotel stays, and other freebies would fall straight into the hoax. Sorry guys, economists said that there is no free lunch!
Oft I wondered who these twats who started this brand of jokes are (Chain-letter writers fall under the same category). They ought to be ostracised and sodomised and made to do community service afterward to repent for their misleading behaviour. They, like the false prophets, have given the people false hopes of fortunes, diamonds and golds and I suspect that some poor souls had spent their entire salary three weeks too early hoping to receive that extra dollars from some big corporations.
Well, a year ago for a second or two I thought big windfall had befallen onto my lap as well. Some Nigerian dude wrote me an 'official' letter claiming that I had just won some obscure lottery in Spain amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. My imagination ran amok. I was already imagining quitting my job and retire for the rest of my life until a few seconds later my logic took over and made all the loopholes of the letter so apparent that my sweet reverie had to die a violent death.
According to Janet Jackson, the best things in life are free. Yeah.. still, I stick to the economists' view.
Dear Friends,
... Bill Gates is sharing his fortune... ignore this... repent later. ..... To make sure that Internet Explorer remains the most widely used program, Microsoft and AOL are running an e-mail beta test... Forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (if you are a Microsoft Windows user) for a two week time period. For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you $245.00, for every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every third person that receives it, you will be paid $241.00. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a cheque.
Thereafter followed a myriad of frenzied testimonies from people receiving their monies expressing their unbounded ecstasy.
One testimony read: "I forwarded this mail to three chaps just half an hour back and I just forgot about it.. then I saw my salary slip, checked my account in(sic) the net. I was wonderstuck(sic) to see $30000/- added to my account!! transferred from ms(sic) office thru western money transfer !!! Its amazing guys !!!
Hello? Knock knock. Anyone home? Is the light on?
The loopholes are as large as a gaping cavity (just read the above paragraphs again if you haven't found one) I thought no one would fall for it... but by Judas' toes, I scrolled down the mail and rows upon rows upon rows of people have been forwarding this message to their poor unsuspecting friends, who in turn will forward it to their friends and so on!!! Many of them justify this with the "Well, no harm trying...." statement.
Ahem, so I wrote back to these same acquaintances since they had pissed me off in the past anyway and this was to be my glorious chance to lecture them on their naivety and gave me a momentary high of feeling like a genius. I mean, c'mon, Microsoft is a public traded company with shareholders and board of directors and Bill Gates doing this impractical test is akin to admitting himself to a mental institute. Also, it is technically impossible to track forwarded email and no company does business this way. And third, look at the loopholes.
I have in the past received many more emails where people hoping to get free iPods (that damn gadget!), free monies, free hotel stays, and other freebies would fall straight into the hoax. Sorry guys, economists said that there is no free lunch!
Oft I wondered who these twats who started this brand of jokes are (Chain-letter writers fall under the same category). They ought to be ostracised and sodomised and made to do community service afterward to repent for their misleading behaviour. They, like the false prophets, have given the people false hopes of fortunes, diamonds and golds and I suspect that some poor souls had spent their entire salary three weeks too early hoping to receive that extra dollars from some big corporations.
Well, a year ago for a second or two I thought big windfall had befallen onto my lap as well. Some Nigerian dude wrote me an 'official' letter claiming that I had just won some obscure lottery in Spain amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. My imagination ran amok. I was already imagining quitting my job and retire for the rest of my life until a few seconds later my logic took over and made all the loopholes of the letter so apparent that my sweet reverie had to die a violent death.
According to Janet Jackson, the best things in life are free. Yeah.. still, I stick to the economists' view.
posted by Strawberrysurf at 11:12 pm
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