The hoax in the hospital
A few weeks ago, browsing the magazine shelves at Borders, which sells imported American magazines, I fell on a feminist magazine called Bitch, which had a feature on chain emails aimed at scaring women. They were about men using elaborate ruses to ensnare women, and the article launched into an analysis of why people send these stupid messages around. Their take on it is that these messages perpetuate the notion that women really need to stay indoors and not take any risks with their lives; that bad things happen to bad girls. A few examples of the messages are detailed in this page: CIAC Scare Chains.
On Monday, I went into the medical records department at a certain west London hospital (and this department has some sort of educational function as well). My job was to fetch bags full of such records, put them in a truck and drive them to another London hospital. On the table, when I returned from the other hospital, I found a message, covering three sheets of A4 paper, in bold Swiss capitals, containing a print-out of one of these chain emails. “TO ALL MEN: PASS THIS TO ALL THE WOMEN YOU KNOW!! TO ALL WOMEN: REMEMBER THIS!!! THIS GIVES ME THE CREEPS!!”
The message was basically the third of the messages on the page linked above: “Bad guy changing a tire”. It’s about a man who lets a woman’s tyres down when she’s away from her car, then turns up like a good Samaritan to pump it up, and surreptitiously puts a case in her boot which turns out to contain weapons, which he intends to use on the woman. I could not help noticing that “tire” was not spelled as it commonly is in England (tyre; tire is a verb, as in being tired), and that there was a reference to “the mall”. We don’t call them malls here (although the word is used in some actual names); we usually call them shopping centres. The bit about Toronto on CIAC’s version, however, was cut out. So, even if the story was true, which it’s not, it is about things supposedly happening in Canada, not in England. So what’s it doing scaring women in hospitals in London?
On reading the message and recognising it as a hoax, I immediately told several of the staff at this department, who are nearly all female. They did not remove it, and one of them even suggested that the man in the hoax was me and that I was trying to remove warnings of the danger I posed to women! I eventually called the hospital’s main switchboard, asked to speak to someone in management who could lean on medical records to fix the problem. However, the lady on the switchboard took my message and said she’d pass it on, and that I’d know it had been sorted when “that nuisance thing” was gone. I expect I’ll find out tomorrow, when I go in to fetch the records.
Seriously, if you get one of these, do the research before you pass it to your entire contacts list, let alone print it out and stick it on a table on the entrance to a hospital department. If there really was a man tricking women in this way in your area, the police would tell the press and you’d hear about it in the news. Chain letters containing scare stories are almost always hoaxes, and if the story contains foreign usages of English that would not appear if it was aimed at people in your country, why pass it to others in your country?
As for why people write these things, my suspicion is that it is just a sick minded individual who wants to get kicks out of scaring women. Quite possibly, he is like the guy who flattens the tyre in order to change it. I really can’t imagine that there is any political motive, as the article in Bitch magazine implied. Someone has just moved on from email viruses which activate when they’re just read (as opposed to an attachment being opened) and the chain letter which someone in Venezuela didn’t bother to forward and died of cancer. If you get any of these, then “reply all”, tell them it’s a hoax and point them to the page linked above.
