Hoaxes and Google

I know I've written before about my wonderful friends, and their inability to use Google to search for the hoaxes in the emails they forward with such monotonous regularity. However, today's question is this: Why do people start these idiotic lies in the first place?

For me, at least, one of these will cross my email portal (I'd have said door-step back in the day when it was chain-mail), and while there are days when I can't be bothered to look it up, and it doesn't sound too stupid anyway, so I'll accept it at face value for the moment, but I'm certainly not passing it on. Then there are the ones which are so chock-full of patently idiotic claims that I'll be compelled to head on over to Snopes or Google, just to confirm my suspicions.

So it happened recently that I was in receipt of an email telling me that for the first time in, like, FOREVER, this year July has 5 (count them!) Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. This, the email continued, happens only once every 823 years!!! Yes! That's right. Once in 823 years does July have the 5 weekend days. Since I was busy thinking about other stuff, I actually ignored this one, and sent it to trash. I wondered, briefly, if this was true, but mention of Feng Shui dampened my curiosity, so I didn't bother to look.

On to yesterday, when a link on Reddit caused me some amusement, but I still delved no deeper.

Until this morning. I have a friend. No, I'm not boasting! Really, I have many friends, but this one is special. She's one of the ones of whom I wrote last time, one of the ones who will forward on any old crap, and for whom any kind of skepticism is a totally alien concept. She's also a person I love deeply, so we'll be using no names! Let's just say it came as NO surprise whatsoever to find that she'd done the old copy pasta on her Facebook page this morning, exhorting us to do the same, because those who read and don't copy will get NO money!

So, having meanly shown that the last such incident of the 5 Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays in July was none other than 2005, I came away from Facebook somewhat grumpy, questioning why people DO this. It's not as if there's any actual money in it for them. You're not trashing anyone's hard drive.

Maybe it's for the sheer joy of seeing something you "created" all over the interwebz. The delight you feel when you prank someone and they fall for it must be considerably more delightful when it's a whole bunch of gullible people all over the world, and you can see it being spread by these, um, simple people to all their simple friends. Perhaps it's because you want to expose the world as being inhabited by considerably more morons than reasonable, reasoning people. Maybe, just maybe, you're hoping that by exposing all these morons, they'll see the error of their ways, and actually start to do some research.

Sadly, if that's your plan, I've got to tell you: You're going to be disappointed! I've been actively informing my special friend of the stupidity in believing all the crap being forwarded, and while she gaily apologises for the single infraction I've highlighted, she's back to her old tricks before the virtual ink has dried.

I now feel like a grumpy old woman. And you can just Get Off My Lawn!