Forward Messages

Have u ever received messages which goes something similar to this? Hi. Im Rakesh Trivedi. My son Rajesh(??) Trivedi, 3 years old, has a renal failure and needs to have a kidney transplant asap. As i hail from a poor family in bihar Im unable to meet the expenses of this operation. So the cell phone company has offered to pay me 10 paise everytime this message is sent out. Pls forward this message and help my lil one live. C'mon. Poor people advertise on news papers and other media asking for help. They dont ever send out SMSes.

Damn. I've received 100s of them. And I bet everyone has received atleast a dozen of these msgs. Losers. Everytime I receive one of these, my blood pressure shoots up. I mean, I dont expect SMSes from Bill Gates or some one that important, but when the ringer goes off, I totally expect it to be from my friends asking me to join them at the beach or some other place.

What i find really odd about these messages is the fact that everyone who receives it knows its a fake message but still end up forwarding to their friends. I wonder how many times the person who started it gets these messages back. Dont people know that the cell fone companies are not charity houses to pay people's hospital bills?Even if they do offer to pay for a hospital bill, they dont ask the Rakesh Trivedi's to send out SMSes. Dont people know that they are only clogging the network by forwarding these stupid messages? But I cant blame the people totally. The cellular companies are also to be blamed. They must be blames because they are the ones who give out 100 (approx) free messages per day. My suggestion: Charge every message sent out and received. Let the cost of sending and receiving be as low as 5 paise. Im damned sure that number of these stupid forwards will get reduced by 50% or more.

And these kind of stupid things do not stop with jus sentimental messages. A couple of years ago, in Chennai, there was this forward message that offered 50 rs worth talktime if that particular message was forwarded to 10 people. Sure enough, the idiots out there sent that particular message to everybody on their address book. The number of times the messages circulated was so great that the BSNL network crashed and it led to an official press release from the government owned phone company saying that the message was a hoax. This press release gained nation wide coverage and Im sure every human being alive in india would have seen or heard about it. But even a days days before I left India I got a similar message from my friend about the extra free talktime. And guess wut. Within an hour of the first message I got 4 more of the same Message from my other friends. How i wish I had a spam filter in my cell phone!!

I guess thts it for now. Wait a minute.. i hear my fone beeping. I jus hope its not one of those annoying messages again...waaaaaarrrrrrrgggggghhhh...