You know what I love? (And, in this instance, by “love” I mean “am both mildly amused by and greatly annoyed by.”)

Since we don’t really have time to play the guessing game, I’ll just tell you:

Emails, or Facebook posts or Tweets that end in some version of “And only 3% of you will have the courage to pass this message on.”

Lately there seem to be a proliferation of these popping up, and I absolutely hate them. (See, in this instance I’ve eliminated all sarcasm, but “hate” is a pretty strong word, and here means “strongly dislike”.) Is it just me? Am I the only one to find this to be a ridiculous, offensive, off-putting remark?

I mean – okay, first off, what kind of statistical analysis is being used? Did the original poster of this thing actually do a study to determine that only 3 out of 10 people re-posted their message? And was the study thorough enough to determine that the reason it WASN’T passed on was a lack of courage? Doubtful, so don’t come at me with some big philosophy on life that I’m supposed to take seriously, and then pollute it with your fictional numbers and group-mind scare tactics.

Secondly, does this really work? How many people actually read that and think “Holy Crap! This says that if I don’t re-post it, I might not be cool! I can’t be part of THAT group! I’d better share this QUICK!” I hope the number is small, for the sake of the world.

Thirdly, and this is the big one: Bite me. You’ve offended me, with your sad little “If you’re not one of us, you’ve clearly got no balls, and you suck” threat. You know what, even if I LOVED your message, the minute that you have to resort to peer-pressure taunting to get me to re-post something, you lose. I don’t care if your message is “Theatre is the best artform ever” or “Down with cancer” or “Don’t eat babies with a grapefruit spoon”, if you follow it with “I bet 95% of you are too chicken-shit to re-post this”, you can bite me, I’m not re-posting it. (And here, to be clear, I’m not actually interested in being bitten. But I’m also not interested in passive-aggressive, judgmental little comments designed to eliminate thinking like an individual and promote bullying.)

There, that’s my mini-rant. Now I have to get back to work.

And, listen, if you want to re-post this – go ahead.
But if not, that’s cool too.