How to Get Rid of Your Chain Letters

It seems that there is a superstitious facet to human nature, and few are immune to the allure of it.  Concerns about that which is beyond our control, our future fate, and our ultimate mortality seem to haunt our minds from time to time. Ever notice how a lot of high rise buildings do not have a “13th floor”?  What is actually the 13th floor is named the 14th floor. How do you feel when you see a black cat?  Is it different from how you feel when you see a cat of another color?  It seems that we are conditioned to respond to these things in an emotional manner, even if they might seem to be a bit silly to our logical minds.

And so it seems to carry over to that all too familiar nuisance known as the  “Chain Letter”.

I remember the time a number of years ago when a family member showed me a chain letter that someone had  mailed to her.  She didn’t know who it was from, but it had some instructions in it to make copies of the letter and mail them to others.  It may also have had some promise of some kind of “reward” if the instructions were followed, and some kind of “punishment” if they were not. I told her that this was a bunch of garbage, and that she should throw the letter away.  But she seemed to be rather nervous about it, and seemed to be seriously considering doing what the letter said to do.  So I told her that I could rip the letter up for her and throw it away, but she seemed to be a bit hesitant about me doing so, as maybe it might cause “something bad” to happen to her. At this point, I offered to have the “bad luck” come to me instead, so I took the letter out of her hands and made up a little ritual on the spot, telling the “spirits” that if they didn’t like what I was going to do, they could come and haunt me about it later.  Then I tore the letter up and threw it into the garbage can. To date, I can’t say that I’ve ever been visited by any spooks that may have been associated with that letter.

I understand that chain letters nowadays tend to be sent over the internet, often as email. What I will write next may of course seem obvious, but if you have received a chain letter, say, as an email, my advice to you is to simply delete it and forget about it.

However, there are probably many people who are genuinely disturbed by these kinds of things; and if you are one who gets an uneasy feeling from an “e-chainletter”, and are getting ready to do what it says to do, my advice to you is NOT TO DO WHAT IT SAYS! If it makes you feel better, you can look at the following image, and imagine that you are tossing the torn-up “e-chainletter” into the “virtual toilet” (“e-toilet”). Then delete the e-chainletter, and imagine that you are flushing it down the toilet. Out of sight, out of mind… Good Riddance! (And don’t worry about those kinds of things anymore… it’s all a bunch of SUPERSTITION!) 🙂

How to Get Rid of Your E-Chain Letters

BTW: If you get one of those paper chain letters in the mail, get rid of it by throwing it into the trash, or running it through the paper shredder. Never try to flush a paper chainletter  down your toilet – it might plug up the plumbing! 🙂