The following email has been doing the rounds lately ....
"This message is serious and has been passed to us from Cheshire RFU.
Could you please cascade as quickly as possible as this came through our NHS web page.
For your information, a couple of weeks ago, in the Odeon cinema, Festival Park, a person sat on something sharp in one of the seats. When she stood up to see what it was, a needle was found poking through the seat with an attached note saying, "you have been infected with HIV". The Centres for Disease Control in Birmingham, reports similar events have taken place in several other cities recently.
ALL of the needles tested HAVE been found positive for HIV. The CDC also reports that needles have been found in the coin return areas of pay phones and coke machines. Everyone is asked to use extreme caution when confronted with these types of situations. All public chairs should be thoroughly but safely inspected prior to any use. A thorough visual inspection is considered the bare minimum. Further more, they ask that everyone notify their family members and friends of the potential dangers, as well. The previous information was sent from hanley police station to all of the local councils in the Staffs area and was interdepartmentally dispersed.
We were all asked to pass this to as many people as possible.
[Name Removed]
Assistant Health & Safety Adviser
Health & Safety Unit
[Contact details removed]"
It is, of course, a hoax. You can read about it here.
It's hard for us grumpy people to see just what satisfaction can be gained from writing this kind of thing. You'd think there were enough bad things in the world without inventing a few more. The people who do it must be particularly hard up for something to think about, and if the GOS ever thought he'd caught up with one of them he'd seriously consider experimenting with some rectal surgery using a sharpened stick. And not very sharp, either.
Now we're not going to undertake to try and warn people about every hoax and virus and scam, because frankly we can't be arsed. We'd just like to offer this advice:
Every time the GOS gets an email that asks him to forward it to his address book, or a warning about a virus even if it comes from one of his friends (one of the few he has left), he always googles it. For instance, on this occasion he entered "cinema" and "HIV" into the search box. And he always finds that somewhere there is a credible website saying the thing is a hoax.
There actually aren't nearly as many threats on the web as people make out. There are quite a lot, of course, just not as many as everyone thinks. The so-called "experts" like to keep us worried so we'll think they're important and buy lots of anti-virus software.
So be like the GOS. Take everything with a pinch of salt, suspect even your closest friends, always think the worst, and keep using Google which is one of the few facets of modern life the GOS can't find it in him to complain about!
Yet.
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
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