She'll catch you on the flip-flop, Good Buddy
LORI CLINCH Are We There Yet?
It just seems like yesterday that I first received an honest-to-gosh e-mail account.

It wasn't long before I began communicating on a daily basis with cousins from afar, friends from my youth and the lady across the street. Quite frankly, I hadn't been so thrilled about a line of communication since my first CB radio.

Ten-4, Good Buddy.

E-mail was fun at first, and I learned a lot. For instance, I never knew that there were people in Florida who were responding to people who were flashing their brights by flashing their own and ending up being terrorized at gunpoint. Nor did I know that one could crack eggs into zip-lock baggies and then boil them with ease and feed overnight guests a lovely breakfast with minimal cleanup.

Then I learned that lemons in restaurants were tainted with E. coli right before they're dropped into our water, that Elvis was alive and doing well, and that if you boil eggs in zip-lock baggies, you're most likely to become ill or at the very least develop a nasty case of indigestion and a bad aftertaste.

Now that I think about it, it was amazing how much useless knowledge I gained.

Along came the chain letters and the promises of wealth and prosperity offered just for the e-mailing. For example, some guy named James has a cousin who is an attorney and goes to church a lot (so he must be trustworthy) who sent a particular chain letter to 10 friends and received a windfall from The Gap the very next day.O

n the flip-flop of things, poor Mary Lou did not forward the chain letter to 10 friends immediately. Rather, she put it on the back burner of her day, and that very afternoon she lost the keys to her car, so she was unable to meet up with her boyfriend in a timely fashion, and while he was waiting for her he spotted a redhead and decided to take her to dinner instead. (Rumor on the streets has it at that Mary Lou's boyfriend and the redhead now share a condo in upstate New York.)

I really began to ponder at the e-mails with the subject line "I'd better get this back." I couldn't help but wonder who wanted these e-mails back and why? What were they going to do with them? Didn't they just send it to everyone they know? What does it mean if I don't send it back? If keeping the e-mail to myself was wrong, did I really want to be right?

Worse yet, there are the e-mails insisting that I, and I quote, "Forward this to everyone you know." Better yet, "Forward this to the 10 most important people in your life, I just did."

That one made me cranky. Especially since I saw the sender of the e-mail in the mall the week before and she barely said hello. If I'm one of the 10 most important people in her life, sending out that e-mail might not be her biggest problem.

I had to learn the hard way that there are no AIDS-loaded hypodermic needles awaiting my behind in movie theater seats, that Bill Gates wasn't tracking my e-mails in hopes of sending me a big fat check, and that a virus swarming the nation wasn't so big that ESPN put it in as their leader in their news for the hour on the hour.

However, word on the Net had it that there's some little genius sitting in his parents' basement that may or may not be sending a virus to me under the disguise of an electronic birthday card and could at any moment ring my bell and crash my hard drive.

And during National Hug Week, no less.

Just when I became so skeptical that I considered every subject matter from "Slow Dance" to "Add your name to this list so Penny can get an 'A' " to be a hoax, my good friend Maisy's son called his mother and proclaimed that he'd received a check in the mail from Bill Gates.

"It's true, Mom," he exclaimed over the phone. "I received the message that says that Bill Gates is tracking e-mails, so I followed the instructions and just today this check showed up."

I'm here to tell you that my faith in email has been renewed. In fact, I told Maisy to have her son send it to me so I could forward it to the 10 most important people in my life, and I'll be sure to insist that they send it back.

When my check arrives, the first thing that I'm going to do is to go out and buy a CB radio.

Lori Clinch is the mother of four sons and the author of the book "Are We There Yet?" You can reach her at www.loriclinch. com.