Sideswipe

George de Silva walked into the Henderson branch of the Warehouse looking for a pair of socks

An enthusiastic young Pakuranga secondary school teacher was taking a class of young teens and explained to a room full of blank-faced English students that the lesson was about letter writing. "What's a letter?" one student eventually had the courage to ask. The teacher replied: "A letter is just like a txt, only you use the complete words, and is arranged in a prescribed format with punctuation. I'll show you an example. The document is typed or handwritten on a sheet of paper, signed, just like a tag, folded, inserted into an envelope that is addressed and has a stamp affixed, and then posted through a post box." "How quaint," was the comment from a class member near the back of the room.

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Five rules of forwarding emails. Good advice from Tech Pedia (http://technopedia.info/tech):

1. Don't forward anything without editing out all the forwarding email addresses, headers and commentary from all the other forwarders. Don't make folks look among all the gobbledy-gook to see what it is you thought was worth forwarding.

2. If you cannot take the time to write a personal comment at the top of your forwarded email to the person you are sending to, you shouldn't forward it at all.

3. Think carefully about if what you are forwarding will be of value (accurate information - check for hoaxes at www.snopes.com), appreciated (something the recipient needs) or humorous (do they have the same sense of humour as you do) to the person on the other side.

4. Never forward a chain letter; regardless how noble the topic may seem, virus warnings or anything that says "forward to everyone you know" simply shouldn't be forwarded.

5. If you forward to more than one person, put your email address in the TO: field and all the others you are sending to in the BCC field to protect their email address from being published to those they do not know.