Have you ever received an email that you found interesting, shocking, scary or just too darn difficult to believe? Maybe the one about the man who's hiding under cars at the local mall slashing people's Achilles tendons? Or how about the one where there's the dying kid who hopes to get 10 million birthday cards for his birthday?
These are referred to as "Urban Legends" or "Urban Myths" and there are several websites where you can go to "verify" or debunk many of these emails that you get from friends (Usually with a lame disclaimer that "it's true because a friend of mine is an attorney and he checked it out")
Well, some of them are just too silly to even worry about checking out whether they are true or not and some you just don't care because the proverbial "buck stops here"and it gets deleted instead of forwarded to continue the "myth." And just every once in a while, you don't care whether it's true or not, you like it.
Here's one I recieved this week that has been verified by several de-bunking sites as false. It's supposedly a speech that was given by Microsoft's Bill Gates to a high school class about the 11 Things They Didn't Learn in High School.
Well I don't really care if Bill Gates never actually said these words but after reading them, perhaps you'll agree that these aren't bad words of advice for our next generation of adults to hear.
Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it!
Rule 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.
Rule 6: If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one
Now if you agree with the things on this list, please forward it to twenty people within the next twenty minutes or else something horrible might happen to you and your computer.
Trust me...a friend of mine is a blogger and he told me it's true.Now go out and do something "legendary" this weekend!
