Warning!!

[Lulu]

Hi,

I received an email from a friend relating incidents in Jacksonville, Fla. where someone is attaching hypoderic syringes, with Aids infected blood, to gas pump handles.
Seventeen people have been stuck by these and eight have
already tested positive for Aids.  There have been 12 other incidents nation wide that appear to be copy-cat incidents.
Please be careful in your travels.

[BrianB]

Luann -

Not trying to burst your bubble but I think in this case it's not a bad thing!! The following is from a very handy website called Urban Legends Check it out:

Pump at Your Own Risk!  
 
Netlore Archive:  'Captain Abraham Sands' of the Jacksonville, Florida Police Department warns that evildoers are exposing unsuspecting victims to AIDS by attaching HIV-contaminated needles to gas pump handles  

Description:  Email hoax
Circulating since:  June 2000
Status:  False
Analysis:  See below
 


Comments:  Not to worry. On June 20, 2000, mere days after this dire warning first slammed the Internet, the Jacksonville Sheriff's Department issued a press release declaring it a hoax. "The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office has had no reports of such incidents and there is no 'Capt. Abraham Sands' at the JSO," the notice said. No such incidents been reported anywhere else in the country. Whoever authored the email made every word of it up.

Even so, the message contributes an interesting new wrinkle to the HIV needle-stick rumors circulating in various forms since 1997. Previous variants warned of tainted syringes planted in movie theater seats and pay phone coin slots, not to mention random "stealth prickings" (for lack of a better phrase) in night clubs and other crowded public places. Now we have tainted needles on the handles of gas pumps to contend with. Where will they turn up next?

All of the variants have been debunked by authorities, with the sole exception of a brief spate of copycat pranks in Virginia at the beginning of 1999. According to police there, actual hypodermic needles were found in the coin slots of public phones and in bank night deposit slots in a couple of small towns in the area. However, none were contaminated with HIV. Presumably the pranksters were imitating rumors that had already been rampant for months.

Unsubstantiated though it may be, the belief that unknown assailants are intentionally spreading AIDS by hiding contaminated needles in public places remains popular, especially on the email forwarding circuit. One reason is that these tales, and other urban legends like them, provide an outlet for our fears — of strangers, of the motives of some of the more marginal members of society, and of AIDS itself. They are spread in the form of cautionary tales, though they don't really function as such — at least, not on any literal level — because they fail to address the primary way HIV is actually transmitted: unsafe sex.

Curiously, though, these made-up scenarios do function very well as metaphors for sexual acts. Each one of them, by virtue of the fact that a needle-prick is involved, symbolically associates the contracting of AIDS with an act of penetration. Consider the symbolic charm of the notion that one risks exposure to HIV simply by inserting one's finger into the grimy coin slot of a much-used public phone. The imagery may not be pretty, but it's uncannily apt.

Now we're being warned to be careful when pumping gas. Take all due precautions, we are told, before sliding that nozzle into the tank.

Sound advice?  Metaphorically speaking... yes!