Ratting out urban legends at work - employees should be educated on how to identify hoaxes that are being sent through electronic mail and the Internet

HR Magazine, Sept, 1999 by John T. Adams, III

The other day I got an e-mail, breathless in tone, warning me of a possible threat to my life.

"Whenever you buy a ... canned soft drink, please make sure that you wash the top with running water and soap or, if not available, drink with a straw," it said.

"A family friend's friend died after drinking a can of soda!

"The top was incrusted with dried rat urine, which is toxic and obviously lethal!!!!! Canned drinks and other foodstuffs are stored in warehouses and containers ... [and] are usually infested with rodents and then get transported to the retail outlets without being properly cleaned.

"Please forward this message to the people you care about. Thanks."

Someone I know had forwarded the e-mail to me - and about 200 other people. But reading it a second time, I discovered another signature at the bottom: the president of a market research company in the Northeast.

First I did a little research on the Internet to check my hunch. As I suspected, the e-mail was a new urban legend making the rounds.

A little more research led me to the company whose president had sent the message I received. I contacted the company's PR person who confessed that, yes, her boss had sent it after receiving it from someone he knows. But, she said, it only had been distributed to the 100 or so employees in the company. Some of the employees obviously hit the "forward" button, pulled some names out of their address books and clicked on "send."

Eventually, through friends of friends of friends, the message worked its way to my mailbox.

The same things that make the Internet valuable for research, commerce, entertainment and communication also make it a wonderful vehicle to fool people. There's a lot of fooling going on in the online world, from get-rich-quick schemes to credit card scams to computer viruses to chain letters - and to the propagation of urban legends.

The Internet makes spreading these myths easier and faster. And a lot of your well-intentioned employees are probably doing it on company time, using your company's system and clogging its bandwidth to warn their friends and family about the latest life-threatening hoax.

A little education for your employees might be in order.

If you want more information on urban myths and other Internet prevarications, my favorite web site is www.scambusters.org. It lists its own collection of scams, hoaxes and legends, plus links to related sites.

And if you've been fooled or amused by an urban legend, send me a note at jadams@shrm.org. I may use it in a future column or as a letter to the editor. But I promise not to forward it with breathless warnings to 200 of my closest friends.