Chain Letters

[sobrique]

I hate chain letters.
The are evil.
I've just had one from someone, who's forwarded it to everyone in the company.
About a little girl in phuket who can't remember anything, and has lost her parents, with a photo attachment

I felt the need to reply:

"Tragic though it is, chain letters really don't help matters much. After all, this little girl has already been re-united with her family.

http://www.snopes.com/photos/tsunami/lostgirl.asp

Then if you take a 60kb chain letter, and multiply it by all the users in $COMPANY, being 55,000, you use up 3.5Gb of disk space, and the bandwidth necessary to transmit it.
The disk space (including backups) costs us around £600 per year.
The bandwidth would tie up the entirety of a 2Mb site internet connection for about 5 hours, slowing down all our other network traffic in the meantime.
This is leaving aside the cost of 55,000 employees each taking 30 seconds to stop and read this email, which works out at about 450 man-hours.
If they then send it on, then the problem multiplies."

Grr. Where's my LART.

Edit:

Have now had a response

"I'm sorry for wasting your time, this only came to me this morning and I didn't know she had been reunited with her family. But I would rather waste people's time than think it wasn't my problem.

Regards"

Comments

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

A chain letter like this one irritates me a lot. The reason people who work at information desks in public buildings read out what the parent's name is and not what the lost child's name is, is so that some random person doesn't come to the desk and abduct the child by pretending to be its parent. In hospitals across the tsunami region there are already reports of many children being claimed by people who then try to sell them to the sex trade. Sending a picture of a little blonde girl who doesn't speak across the internet is a very unhelpful thing to do indeed. I'm glad the damned chain letter was a fake, because if it would true she would be in living hell by now.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

If it *were* true, I mean, not would. Bah.