gone-completely-dotty@wit's-end

I got yet another of those emails this week - the ones that tell you to send this message on to 10 new people within 24 hours…

I got yet another of those emails this week - the ones that tell you to send this message on to 10 new people within 24 hours in order to receive not just eternal happiness but also wads of money in small easy denominations, a trip to Disneyworld and the solution to world peace made easy. As usual there was a string of addresses showing where the email had been passed on like a hot potato, ending with a rather breathy note, from somebody called Anya in New Zealand who used a phenomenal amount of exclamation marks to tell me that she didn't normally believe these things!! But this one really works!!! Honestly!!!!

If Anya is reading this on the Internet, I hope that her eternal happiness isn't marred by the news that I promptly binned the email, thus ending a chain that had been unbroken for 18 months!!! I'm sure I'm not alone in getting a huge amount of these type of emails and I'm sure I'm not alone in finding them equally irritating each and every time. There is, of course, a gritted-teeth factor in the sheer nonsensical nature of the things. While I'm firmly behind the notion that there is such a thing as a free lunch, I can't help feeling that if somebody had come up with a plan for scoring world peace, bags of monies and free holidays, the news would surely have leaked out beyond the world of people who use the Internet and too many exclamation marks.

Another annoying thing is that somebody I know must have sent this email to me. Admittedly people's emailing lists are now a bit like the autograph books one brought back from Irish college - packed full of addresses of people you came across once, will never see again and can't quite remember. I regularly get matey communications from a DJ collective in New York, the honorary degree department of a national university and a nutcase called Philip.

Still, a large proportion of the idiotic chain letters I get are from people I know perfectly well. When I'm having a bad day I can spend long stretches of time worrying about the fact that they must have thought I would enjoy and believe a chain letter.

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However, the thing that annoys me most about these emails is that they illustrate so clearly the fact that the Internet is reducing us to juvenilia rather than advancing us anywhere. I remember being quite charmed when I got my first email chain letter, just a week after I signed up for an email account. The years seeped away as fast as my brain cells seem to, and I felt I was in third class again, getting a piece of exercise book paper that said terrible harm would come to my family pets if I did not pass the message on immediately.

Back then the problem was always that you didn't actually have 10 people to send it on to as the original chain letter culprit had already snaffled all your class mates. Anyway, my mum always took them from me, put them in the bin and said that I wasn't the one breaking it, now was I? But it's surely a little worrying, when a medium that was intended to form an information super-highway is being turned into a swing on the jungle gym. Increasingly, millions of young whizz kids in offices around the world are using email in the same way the note-passed-from-desk-to-desk system was used in school rather than as a system for exchanging information.

Chain letters are not the only things to have reared their ugly heads for the first time since primary school. I swear I hadn't set eyes on a "personality test" in 10 years either - now I receive at least one a week. These are the most appalling load of guff that usually involve you writing down your favourite animal, colour and brand of dental floss followed by the first thing that comes into your head about the sea, a room with no doors and labrador puppies.

If you do this correctly - No peeking!!! Be honest!!!! - this test will tell you your real feelings about sex, who you should marry, your attitude to death and the current birth rate of Djibouti, or something similar. They are always reeking of New-Age-style claptrap - one last week went along the lines of "The person you name in sixth place is your lucky star while the 10th place is a song telling you how you feel about life".

If I was in a place where I had to rely on such a "personality test" to tell me how I felt about life, I can't help feeling that I would be in strong need of a very lucky star indeed. There is also a strong whiff of the school ethos attached to the most popular email exchanges of all bar pornography - bad jokes. Except that this doesn't worry me nearly as much as the other emails as I really quite like appallingly bad jokes and some of them are actually quite funny - honest!!! The only problem here is that there is nobody left to tell them to as everybody you know is on the same mailing lists.

I think that the reason for all this playschool nonsense zipping between kids in offices probably has a lot to do with our writing habits. Apart from the odd covering letter to prospective employees ("I am a team-player with a strong dogmatic streak") most of us probably haven't written personal letters since our school days. Back then when parents wielding long sticks always got their own way over use of the telephone for long distance calls, there was always some German pen-pal that needed fobbing off, or some best friend/ boyfriend that had been whipped off to the Gaeltacht necessitating long letters written with coloured pens on fancy paper.

So, when we were suddenly asked to write to each other via email rather than talk over a phone, we resorted back to our old school writing etiquette. It's not that we were necessarily good at writing letters in the days of chain letters and personality tests, it's just that we haven't really written anything since. But the really excruciating thought in all this is that in five or 10 years time we will naturally have progressed to under-graduate humour instead - how many Trotskyites does it take to change a light bulb anyone?