The other day I received an email at work from a co-worker and friend. He had received it from a friend along with 30 or so other people in the “To:” address field and several other bunches of recipients along the way. He felt it was serious enough to forward to me - I clearly owe him my thanks.

Seems someone was putting HIV-loaded hypodermic needles under gas pump handles. Eeegads! And it was backed up of course by a very official notice posted by an Ontario Provincial Police Captain. Who could refute that? Never mind the fact that this was all done with the noble purpose of alerting all our friends to the grave danger lurking at every fill-up.

Being the geek/skeptic/smarty-pants that I am, I figured a quick visit to snopes.com was in order. Wow. Seems that Mr. Staff Sargeant gets around. He’s issued the same letter for the past several years while working for a variety of police organizations around the continent. I didn’t know it was such a widespread problem.

Clearly not as widespread as gullibility though. In an effort to at least inform a few concerned individuals inside my own tiny circle of influence I hit ‘Reply to All’ and simply typed:

“This is bullshit. See: http://www.snopes.com/horrors/mayhem/gaspump.asp”.

I received only one reply back from the 30 odd people it went to. And that reply was just one word, “Unbelievable.”.

I’m hoping the 29 others were too ashamed/shy/embarrassed to respond, but afraid that most never clicked through on the link.

Maybe there should be some sort of viral campaign to point all of these posts back to snopes or some other source of rational evidence. Deflate ignorance, and the fear it creates and inflate skepticism and intelligence.

Lets edumacate these people!