Another day at the office. Get to work, have some breakfast at the desk (Diet Coke + ZonePerfect bar = usual workday breakfast), check the e-mail. Delete ridiculous quantities of preposterous spam.

Then sigh upon seeing yet another e-mail from a friend or family member, carrying a subject matter starting with the dreaded “Fw:”.

Scroll down through the twelve forward headers with comments (“Useful information!” “From So-and-so” “VERY IMPORTANT” “Great info!” “PASS IT ON TO EVERYONE IN YOUR ADDRESS BOOK!”), scan the original message just long enough to glean keywords, look keywords up on Snopes.com, copy link from Snopes into reply e-mail, e-mail friend or family member back explaining that this is yet another bogus one going around.

Rinse, lather, repeat the next day.

If men were angels, no Snopes would be necessary. But since they are not, every blog ought to carry a link to the Urban Legends Reference Pages, with a plea to readers to check the site before passing on forwarded e-mails. So here is mine:

Dear reader,

In an ideal world, none of you would be That Person in everyone’s e-mail address book, That Person who forwards a lot of stuff to a lot of people all the time. But that’s too much to hope for. So, if you must be That Person, at least, at least, check out the Urban Legends Reference Pages at Snopes.com before you forward anything.

Oh, and while you’re at it, please stop sending me attachments I haven’t asked for…or failing that, at least keep these points in mind:

1) Any attachment is a potential security risk, and that goes double for attachments from That Person (who is less likely than most to maintain a virus-free computer). So anything I’m not expecting is subject to peremptory deletion, without apology.

2) Photo and multimedia attachments are big and can fill up my e-mail box, causing messages I was actually waiting for to bounce. Attached photos that cause this to happen are subject to whimsical editing in the GIMP.

3) I can’t open Microsoft Office documents at home and those attachments never, ever contain anything that really needed Office to create anyway. Plus, I really, really despise PowerPoint presentations as a point of general principle. All .pps and .ppt files are subject to peremptory deletion with extreme prejudice (.doc and .xls only slightly less so).

Thank you for your attention. Though if you were paying attention to all this, there’s a 95% chance you never were That Person anyway. But thanks for listening anyhow…

…oh, and BE SURE TO PASS ON THIS IMPORTANT INFORMATION TO EVERYONE IN YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS BOOK, PREFERABLY WITH A MESSAGE IN ALL CAPS SO EVERYONE KNOWS HOW IMPORTANT IT IS! THANKS!