Don't Break The Chain

This letter was started by a widower in Des Moines who believed he had the ability to talk to barnyard animals. He sent this letter to 12 of his friends and the next week a local paper paid him $10,000 for his life story.

A man in Denver received this letter and mailed it to 12 of his closest friends. The next day he won the town raffle and brought home a new pet guinea pig! A woman in Lancaster foolishly rejected this letter and broke the chain. Two weeks later her children dropped out of college and returned home to live with her while they ‘looked for other options’. That was three years ago! This letter has been around the world seven times! Don’t break the chain.

I miss the old chain letters. Strange as it might sound, I actually enjoyed reading them. It felt good to know that somewhere, someone believed that good things were going to happen to them because they read an implausible set of anecdotal evidence and took the time to copy the letter and mail it out. Someone somewhere spent $0.39 cents to send me a bit of entertainment. I was grateful.

I loved hearing about the crazy people in this fanciful letter and how misfortune struck the poor soul in Wichita or a great new job opened up for an individual in Miami. I believe that I used to think the people in the letters were real, and that somehow this mysterious author knew about them and their life. He knew about them even though he didn’t know anything about me, a horrible chain breaker! I guess I’m just lucky no one told the letter writer about my misdeeds.

I’m not sure when I realized that it was all a fabrication but I don’t recall finding it to be a letdown. No in fact that means that this exciting bit of post just changed from a documentary to something far better. An engaging work of fiction! Someone poured themselves into this ridiculous letter and provided me with a chunk of unsolicited amusement. I know that there are a number of these chain type letters that urge you to send money to a number of people on the list, but there were a few I got that just wanted you to mail it off. ‘Send this to 12 people you know within the next 7 days and good things will happen to you.’

So for nothing more than 12 postage stamps, envelopes and the price of copies, you got to feel good for the next week or so. In addition 12 more people received unsolicited entertainment in their mailbox. It was a win-win situation.

Sadly the Internet has changed all that. I no longer get chain letters. In fact I haven’t seen one since I was in high school. The Internet has pretty much done away with the old chain letter. Now I get a mail box full of SPAM. Very little creativity and most of it just full of vulgarities and medication solicitations. It’s odd the things we miss sometimes.

Anyway please leave a message and keep this post going. 'A man in Santa Rosa broke the chain and later that same week a group of street evangelists knocked on his front door while he was eating dinner. A woman in …'