Do you always receive junk mail? Especially from people whom you know? Do you often get mail that you wish you wouldn’t get from friends, especially friends whom you have known for some time, whose friendship you’d not want to lose or whose feelings you don’t wish to hurt? How do you tell these friends to stop sending you junk mail? To stop forwarding to you those messages that she forwards to her usual mailing list of 36 carefully chosen names? To stop forwarding to you every (lousy) poem, verse, (senseless) joke and article full of horribly spelt words and is ungrammatical to the core? And especially to stop forwarding those oh-so-byte-consuming cutesy-cutesy picture or executable files that take ages to load? How do you do so without offending her?

One man’s junk is another man’s treasure … and the reverse is true too. We often talk about people having a sense of humour, as if there is only one universal sense of humour; you either have it or you don’t. We fail to realise that what amuses us might not amuse others. And besides humour, certain things that make sense to us or which we can specially relate to, may not appeal the same way to others. So that literally-translated Li Bai poem may be funny to you, but may be meaningless to your friend. Similarly, that list of delicious food and where you can get to eat them may be helpful to you but not to your friend who’s not exactly the food-junkie type.

Life is about perspectives. How you see life depends on your perception of things that happen to you and around you. Different people have different experiences, and even if the same event is shared by two or more people, their perceptions of the event may be different. Take for example a near-collision incident which occurred recently - a bus suddenly screeched to a halt causing two middle-aged men to fall and their bodies to slide forward, with one hitting his head against a seat and spilling his pack of lunch all over the bus and himself. When they recovered somewhat from the shock, one of them began yelling at the bus driver, blaming him for the reckless driving. However, a woman passenger came forward to testify that it wasn’t the bus driver’s fault. There was a white van which had swerved into the bus’ path without any warning and obviously the van had long sped off. It was the same event … but different people saw different things!

Would the same office joke about lousy bosses amuse each of the 36 carefully chosen friends on your bulk mailing list the same way or as much as it has humoured you? Will all your friends find that story about God creating the monkey, the dog, the horse and the stupid man equally entertaining? (A special note to christians here: Should one slap jokes like that on God when He has told us the creation process so clearly in Genesis?)

This article is a way to remind us that at one time or another, some of us may have got so carried away with messages, jokes, poems, articles, etc. and the speed of conveying all these to friends on-line that we may not have noticed that this is e-mail abuse! In the name of "fun" and spirit of "sharing", we have invaded our friends’ privacy with meaningless junk. Think about it.