Is it just me, or...? Mystery 2

Well, here's another ponderer: does anyone actually forward those irritating chain mail letter with the genuine belief that there is some fortune-wielding God of Fate tracking every email in cyberspace? Like some justice-imparting Big Brother, with the power to change luck AND/OR send forth deathly punishments for erring emailers - "That's it! Bob in Accounts just deleted his 4th comedy chain email from Betty in HR. Send forth the Hounds of Hell! Destroy!"

You know which emails I mean, don't you? They're those ones which usually start out saccharine sweet, and have some moral message about friendship and love, or about 'seizing the day' and end with the rather uncompromising threat of either death, eternal bad luck, terrible sex or abject poverty if the reader then fails to pass on the email to 10(?) of their carefully selected (i.e - equally moronic) friends.

Some friend they turned out to be, eh? Wishes you all that love and niceyness, sends you piccies of cute fluffy kittens, and then BOOM! - hits you with the whammy of a chain mail... and now you have to find 10 other suckers or your life will be TORMENT! FOR ETERNITY! Yep, that's a real pal you've got there.

Well, guess what? I AM TOTALLY AND UTTERLY DOOMED. I decided to save y'all from the potentially terrible future that lay ahead, AND I REBELLED. I pressed delete. Blimey, it felt good. I felt like Jesus (minus the excruciating pain, beardyness and band of Apostles) - I was sacrificing my future happiness for YOUR benefit. I hope you appreciate it.

Oh, well, if the truth be told, that wasn't EXACTLY how it went - I actually just forgot one time to forward some freaky chain email I'd got. I tell you, it preyed on my mind, it really did (for about a second). And then at midnight (the appointed hour at which I was meant to have been brutally slayed by a psychopathic axe-wielding elf (or was it a zombie?, or was just 7 years of bad luck? I can't remember) I realised that ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAD HAPPENED.

And here's the thing - nothing happened the next night, or the next.... I DID stub my toe the night after that - which I put down to the email jinx - but I remained relatively unscarred for having just defied a curse. So, I decided to test the water and delete all my chain emails. Would you believe it? NOTHING HAPPENED! NOWT...ZERO....RIEN DU TOUT...AGAIN!

Well, I'm still single, 30 and in a rather lacklustre job. Oh, and I have almost no savings, and a big gaping hole where a pension should be. But I'm pretty sure that's just down to my complete incompetence at financial planning, and my rather unambitious personality. It could of course be entirely the fault of those cursed emails... but I somehow doubt it. However, I DID forward one a while later(it was for some romance thing - I was feeling very Bridget-Jonesyish at the time)... and still nothing happened. Or, at least, I'm still single.

Perhaps the Gods of Cyber-Fate do not look kindly on those who do not show utter devotion. I'm clearly just a fair-weather worshipper. Oh, well. Bob in Accounts got a much worse deal.