It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [69]
IF YOU SHOULD EVER BE FORCED BY A ROBBER TO WITHDRAW MONEY FROM AN ATM MACHINE, YOU CAN NOTIFY THE POLICE BY ENTERING YOUR PIN # IN REVERSE. FOR EXAMPLE, IF YOUR PIN NUMBER IS 1234, THEN YOU WOULD PUT IN 4321. THIS INFORMATION WAS RECENTLY BROADCASTED ON FOX TV.
4. “FWD: FWD: FWD: FWD: FWD: NOT TEA PARTY RELATED” (I swear I am not making that title up):
The first thing men look for in a potential victim is hairstyle. They are most likely to go after a woman with a ponytail, bun, braid or other hairstyle that can easily be grabbed. They are also likely to go after a woman with long hair. Women with short hair are not common targets. Men are most likely to attack & rape in the early morning, between 5:00a.m. and 8:30a.m., and will not rape women carrying umbrellas.
The time had come. Even though I had replied to my mother after each and every Forecasting World Destruction bulletin, telling her they were all hoaxes, she kept sending them, one after another. Finally, I felt I had no choice but to call her.
“Mom,” I began. “Thank you for sending me the emails to remind me of all the grisly ways I could potentially die.”
“No problem,” she said simply. “That’s my job.”
“Well,” I said hesitantly, “I think that it’s great that now we all know how to punch out the taillights of cars and wave our hands through the hole while we’re being held hostage in the trunk of a car by a man who plans to use our skulls as soup bowls, but the emails you are sending us aren’t true.”
“What do you mean? Of course they’re true,” my mother insisted. “They wouldn’t be able to send them around if they weren’t true.”
“Mom, remember when I was in my twenties and there was a time period of about four to six, possibly seven, years when you were very mad that I didn’t have a job?” I asked.
“Oh,” my mother replied with a laugh. “Are you trying to suggest that you have a job now?”
“Well,” I said, trying to ignore her, “what I was doing during the day was going to college in journalism school. And what I learned in journalism school was basically to check stuff out. And now you can do that, too. I’ve sent you a couple of replies that have a link in them to a website that can tell you if something you get in an email is true or if it’s an urban legend.”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“The emails I sent you about the website snopes.com?” I asked. “Did you get them?”
“I don’t know,” my mother finally answered. “Maybe I did.”
“How do you not know if you got them or not?” I asked suspiciously.
“I may have deleted some of them,” she said.
“Some of them?” I asked.
“Well, most of them, really,” she answered. “Actually, all of them. When your name pops up in the list, I just hit ‘delete.’ ”
“You don’t even open them?” I asked, a little stunned.
“Most of what you say is nonsense,” she informed me.
“Oh,” I said, nodding my head. “It’s nonsense? You think it’s nonsense? Of course, hitting *77 is nothing short of scientific theory, because guess what? Not only is dialing *77 only useful in a handful of counties in the United States, but it’s the exact number of keys required to hit 911, which works … well, everywhere.”
“They couldn’t send out the email if it wasn’t true,” my mother insisted. “When I get pulled over by an unmarked police car driven by a serial killer, I am dialing *77!”
“Okay, fine,” I snipped. “Push *77. You go right ahead. And when your abductor takes you to the ATM at gunpoint, you try to remember your birthday backward, but don’t worry, because you have plenty of time. The police will never come, because there is no backward-pin-number panic signal. It doesn’t exist; it’s an urban legend. And guess what I’m going to do right now? I’m going to go to the closest Walmart and ask anyone walking by if they’ll sell me cheap perfume, but only if they can test some on me with a squirt bottle! In my face! In my