There are many great reasons to attend UW-Madison—the excellent academics, the party school status and possibly the greatest reason of all: the class e-mail lists.
How could something as dull as an e-mail list provide hours of entertainment? I love it because people will inherently abuse the list. Selling hockey tickets, Heaven's Gate recruitment and one night stand propositions are common ways in which class lists get abused. These abuses then result in some responses that are only classifiable as hilarious.
When I wake up and there's a class list message in my box asking for something banal like study tips, I actually rejoice. I run and get popcorn, because I know some of the finest entertainment on campus is about to come streaming into my inbox.
Apparently people really value their inbox space, and when this one stray e-mail arrives, they feel the need to e-mail the entire list and tell them how much they hate receiving extraneous e-mails.
Here's where things get great. The first response yelling at people prompts another person to respond. They'll make certain it's known that THEY hate receiving extraneous messages as well. After that, a third response, a fourth response, a fifth response shoot through everyone's WiscMail boxes. The school record currently stands at 680,957,029 responses to a solitary request for help in a class.
The ironic aspect of this entire chain of events is it doesn't need to exist. If the first person doesn't respond to that e-mail, the second person won't send out a letter of hate. With no second, there is no third and so on and so forth. The first response causes a massive flooding of mailings.
My inbox is filled right now, since I keep the funniest class e-mail violations. In AOS100 last year, someone e-mailed the class and said she couldn't go to a review session but needed to get a 3.8 to go snowboarding in Vail that winter break, and could someone send her study tips.
This prompted a helpful classmate to respond:
Hey, here's a useful list of some terms and concepts that the professor stressed as especially important:
1. SHUT THE FUCK UP.
P.S.No one gives a shit about your rich bitch problems about ‘having to go snowboarding at an exclusive resort' so don't clog up my goddamn WiscMail with shit like that. Bitch.\
When I got this e-mail, it was Christmas in September. Not only is it a hilarious example of someone wigging out, but this person knew the professor would receive this message, and they plowed ahead and wrote it anyway, profanity and all. It now has an honored spot in my inbox.
What made things even better was the ""snowboarding studier's"" response, which also went out to the entire list. Due to this being a family paper, I'll refrain from printing that e-mail, but suffice to say, a thousand monkeys mashing on a thousand typewriters could not have reached the level of perfection
this person reached in her profanity.
I guess I don't even understand the concept of getting pissed off over this. My view is: It's e-mail—you don't have to read it. If there's an e-mail saying ""I'm going to miss the study session"" and you don't care, delete that sucker! It takes two clicks and can be done while deleting other mail, such as actual spam.
There are plenty things to get pissed off about in this world, superfluous e-mails are not one of them. Instead, sit back and enjoy them for the entertainment they provide.
Clog up Kevin's e-mail box at KevinNelson@wisc.edu.
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