In January 2001, a person wrote me to ask if email she'd received about getting a deadly virus-infected sponge in a big blue envelope from The Klingerman Foundation was a hoax.

Since the main reason for the existence of this site is to offer resources that make it easy for people to take their own responsibility in preventing the spread of hoaxes, and there was no indication the writer had done so, I was perhaps a bit put off by the inquiry. But I went to the hoax page and clicked on the link to the Mining Company's Urban Legends section, and did a simple search for "klingerman". It gave me an immediate hit, with a nicely scathing article by David Emery, the Urban Legends host, about this hoax from back in May, 2000 -- old enough to have variants. He pointed out that the classic part of this particular hoax was that it used all the standard elements of a computer-virus hoax to create a people-virus hoax.

So why am I making a big deal out of this particular hoax? Well, David Emery's excellent format also includes links to places where the hoax made the news. Among them was a link to an article in the Lewiston (Maine) SunJournal:

I highly recommend this story. It hints at the terrible responsibility shouldered by people who pass on hoaxes.

The story tells the tale of a man in Auburn, Maine, who, the day after recieiving the deadly-sponge hoax email, gets a free gift in the mail from a hardware club -- a sanding sponge in a plastic wrapping. He doesn't remember the details -- the big blue envelope, the Klingerman name. He only remembers "sponge in plastic wrapping." He panics.

What ensues is a Keystone-Cops-like intervention by the forces behind 911: three fire trucks, two ambulances with paramedics, officers in biohazard gear -- the whole works. One one level, this story had me laughing out loud -- the foolishness of the person's mistake and the overreaction of the community forces. On a second level, it is frightening, because of the level of emergency services that were tied up when something really serious might have occurred, and the fact that even the FBI is forced to take such reports seriously.

Ultimately, you're responsible . . .

Imagine the situation if you had passed that hoax on to 50 friends, and one of them, only marginally paying attention, and had responded similarly. Imagine that coincidentally, at the same time, a house had caught fire and its occupants (or a firefighter) were killed because of a late response resulting from fire equipment tie-ups due to your email. Or a car wreck had critically injured someone who died on the way to the hospital because the emergency crew was late getting there -- as a direct result of your email. How would you feel? How would your friendship with your now guilty and embarrassed correspondent fare?

It doesn't need to be so close to home. Once you pass on one of these hoaxes, it passes through successive spreading mailings to thousands of people, few of whose situations or foolishnesses you know. If someone far down that line is killed or injured in a similar fashion, you bear a portion of the responsibility for that death or injury, however ridiculous the immediate circumstances that "caused" it.

Please, look before you leap.