[* where subject XYZ can be "Hangout at My Smelly Room on Friday the 13th" or "Who Stole my Muffin in the Fridge in Office Pantry Level 34?" or "Farewell, I am Finally Leaving" or "Movie Plans for 13 December 2023" or "End War in Iraq by Signing This Petition Which Nobody Reads" or or ..well you get the drift]
Well, I found the below extract, hilarious and so true to us, the Generation Re: Fw: Re: Fw: Re: XYZ'. Something similar happened, albeit with less collateral damage and drama, when a freshmen Yours Truly sent a mass-email to my entire dorm at college. I should have written about it and gotten an A, like this guy did for his Culture Shock class at MIT -
*****
" Picture this...On October 23rd 2006 at around 1:00 am, a freshman, let's call him John, sends a seemingly innocent email:
"Hey, did anyone find/grab/steal a brown Aeropostale Sweatshirt from the Physics Lounge in building 8 on Friday? I was in there working on a Pset on Friday and I stepped out for a moment and the next thing I knew it was gone. If you found it please contact me. My fraternity's pledge pin was on it and I need it back."
The email was sent to a mass email list consisting of East Campus, Bexley, Random Hall, Next House, MacGregor, Baker, and Senior House, among other dormitories. A young lady, whom we shall call Elsie, replied: "You should probably die." John hit the "reply to all" button and sent this email:
"WTF. So apparently this one's a bitch. Sorry for spamming but if you don't want to get forum mail you can leave the mailing list instead of being rude. I don't know this person and she probably doesn't have any friends but if anyone sees Elsie, tell her to fuck off for me. Thanks. And thanks to those who were actually helpful."
Kristin, from Senior House, also hit the "reply to all" button and let John know her low opinion of him, how lame he was to lose his sweatshirt in the first place, how lame he was to send an email to the entire school, how lame he was not to realize that an average MIT student spent 30 seconds reading his email, which amounted to a loss of around $300 of future earnings, and on and on. She actually did some math to determine that. Patricia seconded Kristin. Then Peter, Scott and Dan. Within a few minutes, John received a huge pile of very nasty emails. Fortunately, MIT students value community and the importance of keeping everyone informed. Therefore, everyone who replied hit "the button" - reply to all.
A brother in the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity, sensing the situation was running out of hand, thought it would be noble to reply to all too:
"We're all MIT students and we should be mature enough to understand this situation. John, a pledge brother of mine, has lost a sweater and is deeply upset because it had on it the most valuable emblem of fraternal brotherhood: the pledge pin. I'm sorry that anyone might be irritated with the many emails you get from being on your house mailing list. But if you have a problem with these announcements, go to MIT web services and unsubscribe from your house mailing list. Thanks to the hundreds of others of you for understanding. I think John deserves a lot more respect and those who don't have the experience and qualifications for being a fraternity pledge should have nothing to say. Thanks and have a good night".
Little did he know that his email would be the spark that ignited a flurry of more than 150 emails that night. He was called obnoxious for thinking he was better than "us" because he was in a fraternity. (Remember that the email was sent to dorms). Fernando pointed out that fraternities suck and only losers join. Julia asked if her not having a penis dangling between her legs means she had no right to express her opinion. Zos wrote a wonderful piece on how soldiers of certain orders had pledge pins to help them survive being captured by the Japanese sometime in the 19th Century. The email was more graphic than I am willing to put in print. He said it was valuable advice that one may use to prevent getting captured and sent to Guantanamo. Yes, the connection between Guantanamo and the pledge pin doesn't seem to make sense, but trust me, it does. Stacy tried to dissuade people from sending more emails by writing a 250 word essay and sending a modified version of a poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller. Later in the night Koo enlightened us by saying that the poem was actually written by the Nazis glorifying the sending of Jews to concentration camps, so would Stacy "just go and fuck herself." Scott, an electrical engineering and computer science major, sent a story of Vlad the Impaler. Vlad is known to have killed between 40,000 and 100,000 people during his reign. He ruled Wallachia (now a province of Romania) three distinct times over the course of his life with the second reign being the bloodiest. The email listed many of the methods he used to impale his enemies and law breakers. The readers were given advanced warning not to read on if they were in any way faint-hearted because the descriptions of the impaling Vladd practiced were graphic and brutal. For example, one unfaithful wife had her breasts cut off and was then skinned and impaled. While she was dying, her skin was on a table right next to the stake.
Due to the versatility of the MIT student's mind, the simple subject of a lost sweatshirt generated stories from history, current affairs, definitions and descriptions of all the airports in the U.S.A, the pros and cons of fraternities, the reason why Sloaners (people from the MIT Sloan School of Management) are the bombers (cool people), to hundreds of other topics. Those who were fortunate enough to read these emails could testify that all had a moral and helped castigate, abuse, confirm or contradict some earlier email. A grammar freak's contribution was expressing how sad she gets when people write "an hero". The next twenty or so emails hit her hard with criticisms of her freakiness and why no one cares about spelling. We deal with integrals and sigmas and numbers, not words. This is MIT, right? Suggestions for "an hintententinal error", an horse, an hamburger, among others, were floated and argued for. At the end of the night, solid support for "an hero" was found from the urban dictionary and http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/Mitchell_Henderson. The latter is a funny extension of the issue. George, the freshman who is taking 18.701, which is a senior mathematics course, took two hours off his pset to analyze and contribute to the "Re: Fwd: Lost Sweatshirt" thread - even though he was keen on getting an A in a Pass-Fail Freshman semester. Before the end of the night, a Facebook group - "I Participated in the Great Campus-Wide Sweatshirt Search of 10.23.06" – was formed. I am a proud officer of the group with the title "spammer." Our beloved group has 29 members so far and everyone is an officer. We believe in equality.
So if you thought that we only do high-tech research at MIT, you are wrong. If you thought MIT has only nerds who don't know how to communicate (like you see in the movies), you are wrong. If you thought that MIT students are clueless about anything that isn't math, you are wrong. We can make movies, we can correct grammar, we can respond to emails faster than we can respond to calls, we can relate what we learn in class to relevant day-to-day occurrences, we respect the right to educate John and similar-minded people by inflicting some pain, we respect the right to keep everyone informed, so we always hit "the button." We love and hate fraternities, we don't just wear pledge pins without knowing their histories, we have exotic ways to spend our free time between psets, we teach our schoolmates about responsibility, we love life, we live large, we are MIT."
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