Mind Scalpel

When you’re dealing with lawyers via email, you will receive messages with threatening disclaimers attached to them. These disclaimers essentially foretell the Apocalypse if you do something normal, like forward the email message to someone else.

Problem is, lawyers have these disclaimers set to automatically append themselves to every email message they send. So they get slapped onto the most innocuous emails you could ever see.

The other day, participating in an email conversation with some friends, I received a “reply all” email from a lawyer friend I’ll call Sam. His only word in the reply was “cool!”

Followed by a lengthy email disclaimer that said something like the following:

This electronic mail (including any attachments) may contain information that is privileged, confidential, and/or otherwise protected from disclosure to anyone other than its intended recipient(s). Any dissemination or use of this electronic email or its contents (including any attachments) by persons other than the intended recipient(s) is strictly prohibited. If you have received this message in error, please notify us immediately by reply email so that we may correct our internal records. Please then delete the original message (including any attachments) in its entirety. Thank you.

As you will have deduced by now, The Mind Scalpel has a bit of a short fuse. So when I received this one-word email message and disclaimer, I snapped. Here is my reply to Sam. I recommend you come up with similar replies if you find yourself in the same situation.

Sam,

In view of your use of “reply all” to fire off a one-word reply (that of “cool,” no less), combined with your default email signature, I have done the following:

1) I have disseminated your email and its contents to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, LexisNexis, and Westlaw, and have submitted it to an email spam-sending service. As well, I have created an “email chain letter” that is now rocketing its way around the world with your email address as its default “reply to” address.

2) I am hereby notifying you that I believe I have received your email in error. You obviously think I am someone who will accept one-word emails. I am not. Any email reply must always exceed the number of words in the email to which it replies. As you know, I have always hewed to this rule, and I expect others to do the same. Accordingly, please correct your internal records.

3) I am not only not deleting your email, I am printing thousands of copies of it out onto acid-free, archival-quality paper and non-biodegradable mylar sheets, which I will fling from helicopters hovering over the world’s fifty largest cities. I am also etching it onto several hundred non-corrosive, radiation-resistant diamond/iridium crystal alloy plaques, which will survive the heat death of the universe, and contracting with several multinational construction companies to ensure they are implanted into the cornerstones of all the major skyscrapers constructed in the US, Singapore, China and Dubai in the next twenty years (I will also be offering them for sale through the Franklin Mint).

4) There is something called a nuclear-pumped X-ray laser, which is essentially a death ray powered by a nuclear explosion. Unknown to the public, there is now a further iteration of this device that produces a continuous beam; I have used my connections to commission this giant sustained-fire, nuclear-pumped X-ray laser to blast your email message, together with its disclaimer, onto the surface of the Moon, in sufficiently large letters to be visible to the naked eye from Earth.

5) Additionally, I am working with the National Institute for Science and Technology to use the latest nanotechnology manufacturing techniques to embed carbon nanotubes spelling out your email message in all plastics and resins used in manufacturing consumer products in every country in the world. Accordingly, anyone with an electron scanning microscope who examines anything made in the world from non-organic materials will see millions of copies of your email message, and its disclaimer, peppered throughout the image. In short, your email, plus its disclaimer, is about to became part of the very substance of a significant portion of all matter on Earth.

6) Further, I have arranged with SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute) to reverse the polarity of their telescopes for four hours every day; during that time, instead of listening for radio signals from other planets indicating the existence of extraterrestrial life, we will therefore be blaring out your email, and its disclaimer, to all corners of the known universe.

7) As an added measure, I have released a heuristically-adaptive computer virus that will infect all computers using the Windows and Mac operating systems (Linux users will be unaffected), as well as all cell phones, BlackBerries and PDAs; this virus will, on your birthday, cause everyone’s electronic devices to blank their screens except for a scrolling copy of your email message, and its disclaimer.

8 ) Finally, being an expert in recombinant DNA technology, I have designed a biological virus that has already spread itself around the world and which will embed itself in the very genetic material of all living humans. Nothing will happen immediately, but if my calculations are correct, and they always are, three thousand years from now every human being on the planet will be overwhelmed by an irresistible compulsion to stand up at noontime and chant your email message, together with its disclaimer, at the top of their lungs three times. This will give rise to much soul-searching and debate, with much discussion of “who is this Sam Harris person? And what the hell was so ‘Cool’? And what’s with that random disclaimer?”

9) I hope you’re satisfied with what you’ve set in motion.

10) You’re welcome.

So there.

–Mind Scalpel

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