I received an email this morning that was written by the hazardous materials coordinator for a large Southeastern city's fire department. Here's his note:
"We have received information about a mailer that has been sent out nationwide to select business and individuals. The mailer contains two aspirin, that when processed through the mail system becomes crushed and leads to 'white powder' type event upon opening. The company that has sent this out is a network company called 'Intellinet'. The mailer contains advertising that pertains to assistance with networking issues and uses the aspirin as key on 'Networking Headaches'."Â
Heads in some company's marketing department are going to roll (It's not clear which Intellinet this is; if you Google the company name, you'll find out that it's a widely used brand by a number of companies, mostly all in the IT space). You'd think that with all the recent information about the Ricin case in the news, this wouldn't have slipped by in our post-9/11 world. Let's hope there were very few of these mailers and that first responder, safety and security departments recognize this as just marketing-gone-bad.
P.S. This is all unofficial, passed-along-by-first-responders type of information. I've been unable to debunk it like the good folks at Snopes do on so many common email myths. It seems plausible enough, and actually sounds like a good marketing ploy until you think about how well two aspirin would survive a trip through the mail.
-Geoff
