I am noticing a pattern here.
It starts with the text message you think you can check on the sly at work. After all, it's a text message, not a voicemail, so nothing loud should happen when you open it, right?
WRONG! It's a banana with a robe on now suddenly removing its robe to reveal a massive penis, with the Mission Impossible theme blasting, causing you to jump, drop the phone, and make an ass out of yourself in front of two to three co-workers.
Then there's the Three Levels of Guilt Tripping Chain Texts.
Level One doesn't seem so bad...it's a little annoying, but nothing serious.
It usually goes something like: "forward this Hallmark cardlike message to anyone who's made a difference in your life,. including me". It's innocent enough--for one thing, it's optional. I don't HAVE to reply. Nothing in that says I have to reply. There's a bit of peer pressure to do so, I suppose, if you really have made a difference in my life, but I don't have to lose sleep over it if I choose not to respond and/or forward it along to 15 people. But then you start upping the ante.
The next level of guilt-tripping in this process is a little more serious. These texts are the ones that attach a specific reason why the recipient of the text should feel bad for not returning/forwarding it along. And these make me angry. They usually say something along the lines of "forward this to 20 people if you love Jesus. (then they quote the verse about Jesus rejecting the people who reject him)...or you can do nothing. The choice is yours...."
Yeah, some choice. My love for Jesus and my acknowledgment of him as my lord and savior has now been tied to whether or not I forward your idiotic text message to twenty other innocent people just trying to get through the day without any additional, unnecessary stress.
But wait! There's more!
If I don't respond to THAT message, the stakes get even higher.
As if it weren't enough that I just condemned myself to hell for all eternity by rejecting Jesus Christ Himself and not forwarding the burden of guilt along to twenty (or more) people, BAM! Here comes Level Three of the Guilt Tripping Chain Text Process:
"Send this to 35 people and something REALLY AWESOME will happen to you today! Don't send it to anyone, and you will have bad luck for seven years!"
Seven years?
That's pretty heavy stuff, right there. Mostly because it begins immediately as soon as I read the message. The clock is ticking. The pressure is on. At least with the Jesus stuff, I can maybe repent for rejecting Christ by not forwarding the message, but this kind of text is different. There is immediate, irreversible danger!
Now not only have I shown my friends I don't appreciate them and condemned my soul to hell for all eternity, but my life for the next seven years in this world is ruined, as of right this second, because of my initial decision to not forward it because I don't want to bother twenty or more people.
There's also the conditional ones that promise more (or fewer) years of sorrow and suffering depending upon how many people you chose to or not to forward the text message. "Oh, good", I think to myself when this happens, " At least I know four people who won't mind this forward, so now I only have to suffer for TWO years. I can bargain this down!"
Well, I've had enough. Today I'm sending out a message of my own to those of you who place your own needs for validation through mindless social interaction above my need for sanity and peace in my soul:
My love for Jesus does not depend upon whether I not I forward your text to 20+ people. And if it does, then screw you for putting me in that position. I could have spent my afterlife in paradise and you ruined it for me by sending me a CHAIN TEXT?! What the hell kind of friend are you, anyway?!
Stop it. Stop your banana nudity, your guilt trips and your threats.
Stop using my phone as a means to ruin this life AND the afterlife for me. Even if I did have unlimited text messaging, it's still a waste of texts. Things like what I talked about here should just not be said, ever.
If you don't desist, you can expect a whole new level of Guilt Tripping Chain Text from me, and I guarantee it will not be pretty. I will combine all three elements and add something else too, just to make it more interesting. You'll be so busy looking over your shoulder because you didn't even know five hundred people to forward my Level Four Threat To Your Present and Future Lifetimes chain text to EVER have time to send me one again.
At least YOU have been given an opportunity to avoid such a predicament!
Julie
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