Mr. Gullible

I get a lot of forwards every day, emails filled with non-productive content, such as jokes about lazy husbands, or videos of kids doing stupid things, or slide shows with poems and flowery fields that are meant to make you cry, or news articles about unstoppable gas prices, etc, etc. Sometimes these emails are filled with outrageous content that is entirely false. Other times it is genuine stuff. And sometimes it seams real, but isn’t. I’ve been known to get tricked into believing that emails are real when they really weren’t. Yesterday was my most gullible of email moments to date. A video showed up in my inbox that showed people using cell phones to pop popcorn. I’m so paranoid about what cell phones are doing to my brain that I believed it really worked. In fact, I went to the store and purchased popcorn to give it a try. And I didn’t just try it out at home, but I took it to work and convinced a couple of my coworkers to use their cell phones to give it a try with me. I even had a few more people from my department as an audience. It didn’t work of course, and I was left to bemoan my failure in front of everyone. I tried to use the excuse that maybe it had to be microwave popcorn to work. One member of the peanut gallery decided he’d make things worse by asking me if I’d checked out this experiment on Snopes. Well, I did after he suggested it, and sure enough it turned out to be a complete fabrication. Everyone spent the rest of the afternoon making jokes at my expense about how I should try other household chores with my cell phone, like ironing my shirt or whitening my teeth. I should stamp gullible on my forehead before going out in public.