Hi there, and welcome! I'm Wilma Brien. I'm 45, I live in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and for eleven years I have run the office at a heating and cooling company here in town, which means I answer the phone, I do the billing, I send the boys out in the trucks and I know where everything is. Everybody at work calls me the Switchboard. That is also, it turns out, what everybody at church calls me, but for a different reason.

I like to share. When something comes into my e-mail that makes me laugh or cry or worry, I want everybody I love to see it too, and I mean right now. My address book has ninety-four people in it. That's my sister Marjorie, my bowling league, half the people I go to church with, the whole chancel choir, my boss Ed, Pastor Chiasson, and my ex-mother-in-law Evelyn, who I get along with better now than I ever did when I was married to her son.

So when I got the story about the kidney thieves in March, all ninety-four of them got it before lunch. By Sunday the whole church had it. Two ladies in the Thursday Bible study cancelled their bus trip.

Then this summer my nephew Cameron (he's 22 and fixes computers for a living, and he is very patient with his aunt) sat me down at my own kitchen table and showed me The Legend Lab. That's a page by a chemistry student in North Carolina who takes the forwards his aunt sends him and looks into every one. Kidney thieves? Right there. HOAX. I read the whole page and my face got hotter and hotter.

So I went back through my Sent folder, one whole year of it, and I sorted every forward into four folders and gave each one a stamp. This page is the result. Think of it as my homework, and my apology, and a little bit of a laugh at myself, because Lord knows everybody else has had one.

The Folders: Funny · Sweet · Lucky · Scary · The Pledge · Wilma's Rules for Forwarding Now

The FUNNY Folder

Rules for the Office Refrigerator. A long list of rules for a lunchroom fridge, like how long a casserole may stay before it is legally a science project and what happens to anybody who drinks the last of somebody else's pop. It came from a lady at our supply house. I printed it and taped it to our fridge. Nobody followed a single rule, but the boys laughed, and somebody finally threw out the meatloaf from February, so I call that a win.

You Know You Work in Heating and Cooling When... A furnace salesman sent this one around, and it is all true. I added three of my own before I sent it on: you know you work in heating and cooling when the first ninety-degree day in June your phone is ringing before you have your coat off; when your own furnace at home is the oldest one in the county; and when you can tell a blower motor is going bad from the parking lot. Ed says I should have added a fourth, about the office manager who forwards everything. Very funny, Ed.

The Kitty Made Out of Typing. Somebody drew a cat out of nothing but letters and slashes and dots. By the time it got to me it had gone through so many computers that the spaces were all scrambled and the cat looked like it had been through the dryer. I spent a whole lunch hour lining it back up with the space bar. I sent out the fixed one. It was scrambled again by the time it got to Marjorie, so I guess that's just how it goes.

The Indiana Driver Test. A quiz about how you drive if you're from Indiana, mostly about turn signals and what you do at a four-way stop. I scored a perfect Hoosier. So did Evelyn. So did Pastor Chiasson, who wrote back one word, which was "Guilty."

The $250 Cookie Recipe. You know this one. A lady buys a cookie recipe from a fancy department store, gets charged two hundred and fifty dollars instead of two-fifty, and gives the recipe away free to get even. It's an old story with a new store in it, and the store says it never sold anybody a recipe. BUT. I baked them anyway, back in January, before I knew any better, and I have to tell you, they are wonderful cookies. You grind up the oats first. I took three dozen to the office and the boys ate them all before the first truck went out. The Legend Lab baked them too and liked them, so that's two of us. Story: hoax. Cookies: bake them.

The SWEET Folder

The Friendship Poems. I must have sent eight of these, the ones with the pastel border and the poem about what a friend is, and at the bottom it says to send it to ten friends and back to the one who sent it, and if you get three back you are truly loved. Now, the poems are nice and nobody's asking for money, so they get a CHECKED. But here's the thing. I only got two back on one of them, and I spent a whole week wondering what I'd done to everybody. So now I send the poem and I cut off the counting part at the bottom. Nobody needs that kind of week.

The Mama Cat and the Ducklings. Four pictures of a gray mother cat who took in three baby ducks and lets them sleep on her. They took eleven minutes to come in on our modem at home and I didn't care. Is it true? I have no idea. Is anybody asking me for anything? No. CHECKED. Evelyn printed them out and has them on her refrigerator.

What Grandma Wants You to Know. A list of little things, like call your mother, write thank-you notes and always bring a dish. It didn't say who wrote it and it didn't want anything. I sent it to every one of my nieces and nephews. Cameron wrote back, "Thanks, Aunt Wilma, I called my mother." His mother says he did.

Get-Well Cards for the Little Boy in England. This one broke my heart. A boy with a brain tumor wanted to set a record for the most get-well cards, so please send one and pass it on. I sent a card and I sent the e-mail to everybody. Well. According to the Legend Lab, that boy got his record back in 1989, had his operation in 1991 and got better, and his family has been asking people to stop for years. The letter just never got the news. He has to be a grown man by now. I'm so glad he's well. I'm a little embarrassed about the card.

A Penny for the Sick Little Girl. A sad story about a little girl who was very ill, and a big company was going to give a few cents to her family every time the e-mail was forwarded. I forwarded it twice, to be safe. Cameron explained to me, very gently, that there's no way in the world for a company to count how many times an e-mail goes around, and no company has ever done it. There was no name of a hospital, no name of a town, nothing you could check. If you want to help a sick child, he said, give to the children's hospital. So I did, and that's a CHECKED I'm proud of.

The LUCKY Folder

Bill Gates Will Pay You to Forward This. The one where Bill Gates has a program that follows the e-mail around, and he'll send money to everybody who forwards it. I forwarded this four times. By my arithmetic Bill owes me enough to put a new roof on the garage. My check has not come. Cameron laughed so hard he had to get up and walk around the kitchen. I'm leaving it on STILL WAITING because, honestly, at this point it's funnier that way. Bill, if you're reading, I'm at the same address.

The Free Trip from Walt Disney Jr. Forward this and you and your family win a trip to Disney World. Signed "Walt Disney Jr." Cameron looked it up and told me Walt Disney had two daughters and no son at all, so whoever Walt Jr. is, he's not handing out vacations. My bags were not packed. Well, one bag.

Ten People in Ten Minutes. Send this to ten people in ten minutes and something wonderful will happen by Tuesday. Don't, and you'll be sorry. I got about six of these. I always sent them, because what if? The Tuesday after the first one, one of our service vans got a flat halfway to a no-heat call. Then in June I broke one on purpose, just to see. I won eleven dollars at bingo that Friday. Draw your own conclusions. I've drawn mine.

The SCARY Folder

The Kidney Thieves. Here it is, the big one. A man on a business trip in a big city meets a friendly stranger, and the next thing he knows he wakes up in a hotel bathtub full of ice and one of his kidneys is gone. The version I got said a hospital had sent out the warning. I sent it to all ninety-four people on a Tuesday morning in March. By Sunday it had been read out loud in the fellowship hall. Two ladies cancelled their bus trip to Branson. My ex-mother-in-law called me to ask if she should stop staying in motels.

It never happened. Not to anybody. The Legend Lab says it's always a friend of a friend and nobody who it happened to has ever turned up, and that a transplant takes a matched donor and an operating room and a whole team of surgeons, not a motel bathroom. And there's a lady who coordinates transplants for a living who has a whole page called Yes, You Still Have Both Kidneys, explaining with a straight face why nobody ever woke up in that bathtub. At the end she asks you to sign your donor card. I signed mine. So did Evelyn. Something good came out of it after all.

The E-Mail That Erases Your Hard Drive. If you get an e-mail with a certain title, don't open it! Just reading it wipes out everything on your computer! Warn everybody! I warned everybody. Twice, because it came back around in May with a new title. The Legend Lab says this one has been going around since the end of 1994, with the dates cut off so nobody can tell how old it is. Reading a plain e-mail can't run a program, any more than reading a recipe bakes a cake. I liked that so much I wrote it on a sticky note and put it on my monitor.

Melissa. And then, just to keep me humble, the one time the warning was TRUE. In March a real virus called Melissa went around. The difference, and Cameron made me say this back to him twice: Melissa came as a Word document attached to the e-mail. If you opened the attachment, it mailed itself to the first fifty people in your address book. Reading the message didn't do anything. Opening the attachment did. We didn't get it at work, thank goodness. Can you imagine? Fifty of my ninety-four, all at once, and from me? They'd never have believed it wasn't on purpose.

Don't Flash Your Headlights. If you see a car at night with no lights on and you flash your headlights to warn them, it's a gang, and they'll follow you home. I did not flash my lights at a single soul from November to May. My brother-in-law has been a sheriff's deputy for twenty years and he never heard of a single case. He says please, flash your lights. People forget to turn them on.

Next: Wilma's Rules for Forwarding Now
(and an apology to the chancel choir, which is long overdue)

You are visitor number

since August 29, 1999. Most of you are from church. Hi, everybody!


Got a forward you're not sure about? E-mail Wilma
and I'll check it with Cameron before either of us sends it anywhere.

Last updated Saturday, September 25, 1999