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When Your Boss Is Addicted To Memes

This article is so great, but the discussion appears to have expired. No wonder. It was years ago. But that doesn't make it any less relevant. The floods of chain emails have migrated to become social network memes, and Lindsay does touch on that in the article.

My comments will follow.

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My Boss Is Addicted ā€” To Chain Emails

by Lindsay Cross

TheGrindstone, Wed, Jul 11 2012

No, this article isnā€™t from 2002. Iā€™m writing it today, July 11, 2012. And I still know of a business professional, an executive level, mature woman, who fills up my email with chain forwards. In fact, sheā€™s a former boss of mine and sheā€™s still sending out the same marvelous inspirational stories and funny animal pictures. Even better, she sends them to employees, industry contacts and customers alike.

Iā€™m not sure why it bothers me so much to get these little ā€œPass the love on,ā€ notes every day. I can just delete them. Thereā€™s really no reason to open them up and see what they say, because Iā€™ve probably heard it all before. And yet I still do. I still scroll through each one of them. I read the stories of angels appearing during near death experiences. I giggle at the pictures of pets in costumes. Each time I do, I kind of resent my old boss a little more.

Professional email etiquette for years has all said the same thing. No chain emails. Theyā€™re obnoxious, predictable and have nothing to do with business. On our fast-paced culture, no one wants to waste time opening bogus miracle claims. And once youā€™ve started sending that nonsense, very little of your other correspondence is taken seriously.

Yet, there is still an odd sense of solidarity in being a part of my old bossā€™s email forward group. She doesnā€™t have every business contact or customer on there. Itā€™s almost all female. Itā€™s all people who she works with closely. It might even be fair to say that itā€™s a group of ā€œbusiness friends.ā€ We arenā€™t all close enough that she would send personal notes to the whole group. We might not know each other well enough that weā€™d keep up individual emails on a regular basis. But she reaches out with these dumb forwards and makes us feel like weā€™re in some way more than just business contacts.

Itā€™s an odd dichotomy, my sense of community and my growing resentment from these chain emails. They seem to be an anachronism in todayā€™s business culture. Who on earth still deals with chain emails? The closest thing would be the chain Facebook status update, but I can block the feeds of those who do that too often.

Even with itā€™s obvious unpopularity and cliched status though, thereā€™s an extremely successful woman blasting out kitten pics to her customers. Itā€™s become such an odd characteristic of this single person that it doesnā€™t seem nearly as professional. Itā€™s more like a personality quirk. I do have one question about her forwards though, since Iā€™m pretty sure sheā€™s the last person on the planet who hits send on these types of things, just where does she find them?

You can reach this post's author, Lindsay Cross, on twitter or via e-mail at LindsayCross@gmail.com.

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Besides the unprofessional behaviour of spreading memes, they just don't ring true. You know she didn't actually write them, so it just seems fake and lazy to send out such gushy fluff when a person doesn't follow through with actions to prove they really care as much as the memes claim "friends" should.

You also said:

"once youā€™ve started sending that nonsense, very little of your other correspondence is taken seriously."

I will add that once the memes start, they take over, and real conversation just dies. This is because memers would rather share and share, and re-share, and hope for positive feedback on this bilge rather than take the time and make the effort to type out continuing conversations to their friends. They don't realize that it is their friendship and their lives that matter and are more interesting, not all that stuff they circulate.

The meme problem sure hasn't gone away with social media. FB has becoming a dumping ground for chain letters, and it creates them in order to manufacture user activity. Case in point, the worst thing Facebook has ever done, the notorious Friendiversary" meme!

I can't block only the posts I don't want to see, because FB is not that flexible. It used to be that you could hide posts, but that meant hiding everything from certain friends, not just pictures for example. The evil Friendiversary has mutated into so many versions anyway that it is impossible to get rid of every occurrence. It shows up on mishmash videos generated by Facebook according to any user's activity. It takes the form of picture and status announcements, and is a "tagging" meme.

You asked where your former boss finds all these chain letters.

They're everywhere. She probably gets them from friends not in your group, who gets them from other friends etc. you know how memes work. Those sappy animal pictures, old hoaxes and saccharin stories have also made the jump to FB and any other popular platform.

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