dear very smart beautiful cousin whom i love,
i think you might want to check your calendar. despite what the lovely foward that you so lovingly forwarded to me states, i’m pretty sure that today is NOT International Very Good Looking, Damn Smart Woman’s Day.
why? because according to my records International Very Good Looking, Damn Smart Woman’s Day was on January 12th when i first received this lovely foward from your sister.
or perhaps International Very Good Looking, Damn Smart Woman’s Day is on September 22 when i got this lovely e-mail from your other sister.
or just maybe International Very Good Looking, Damn Smart Woman’s Day is on October 9 when i got this e-mail from our other cousin.
may i suggest a new International Very Good Looking, Damn Smart Woman’s Day? i think it might be very well suited for July 33rd, because then that way no very good looking damn smart women will have to see this e-mail ever again.
love,
your not so good looking and damn cranky cousin
Bob Forward, of course.
In 1948, Bob Forward came to this country as an immigrant from Letterania. During the post-war period, as the economy picked up steam and people moved out into the suburbs, Bob missed connecting with his neighbors like he did in the old country. People used to share jokes and other short stories with their neighbors at the local barbershop, coffee shop, diner, etc. As everyone moved out into the suburbs, this valuable method of communicating information was lost.
Bob realized there was a need for this kind of information transfer, but he couldn’t figure out how he could do it. People in the suburbs didn’t have local communal places to gather.
One day he was invited out to go bowling with some friends. While there, he recognized many other neighbors. Bob’s light bulb went off…he realized the bowling alley was the “new” local gathering place.
He tried to organize weekly “talk-ins” but no one in his local bowling alley wanted to attend. (Word was, they were all busy over in the corner making a home movie of a group interview of some woman all curled up in a big white tub)
Bob had no interest in doing this…it wasn’t the kind of communication he knew he missed. Therefore, Bob started ChainLetters-R-Us, which strived to use the US Postal Service to share these kinds of silly and outrageous stories across the country.
Before long, hundreds of thousands of chain letters were being sent around the country, all started by Bob Forward. For the price of a few stamps, people could send meaningless and silly stories and offers across the country to long-lost friends and family.
As the chain letter craze hit the nation, the US Postal Service lobbied the US Congress to outlaw chain letters due to the overwhelming resources it took to deliver all of the mail being sent.
Due to the laws that were passed, and the postal regulations that were enacted, ChainLetters-R-Us ceased operations in 1972. Bob retired, moved to Seattle and started a small umbrella shop in the downtown district.
When the digital age arrived, Bob realized email would give him a way around the postal regulations/laws and he could, once again, attempt to foster the kind of communication everyone missed from the old days.
Bob signed up for a bunch of free AOL accounts and began creating chain letter after chain letter. He was disappointed initially, since so few people took the time to retype the messages to send them onto friends.
Bob talked to (name withheld to protect the innocent) who was working on a program called “Pine” that would soon revolutionize the reading, creation and transmission of email. Bob convinced his friend to include a feature he called “SendOn” which would create a quick copy of the message and allow the recipient to send it on to other people in a matter of a few seconds.
Bob passed away before Pine was ever released to the public. In his honor, his friend renamed the “SendOn” feature to “Forward”. Since then, it has made its way into many other email packages, including the popular “Outlook” brand of Microsoft products.
As a result of all this work, you and I can continue to celebrate the needless communication of jokes and silliness to this day.
dude, aren’t you supposed to be working?
You don’t think that was work? It was a lot of work to read.