Read this or you will get X years of bad luck

I'm sure that you, at any point in your life on the internet, have come across one of those e-mails that tell you to make a wish or answer some questions, and then telling you to forward it or suffer years of bad luck?

I've been wondering how these years of bad luck stack. Do they run simultaneously or add together? If I get 7 years from this one and 4 years from another, do I ultimately get 4 really bad ones followed by 3 bad ones or do I get 11 years of bad total?

If it works like the law and imprisonment it's the latter, and that means I have roughly 150 more years of bad luck to go through before I see another day of average luck or good.

If it works the former, I should have died horribly a few years ago when everybody I knew started sending those around. Unless really, really bad luck was defined as something else that I have yet to find out about.

So if you're reading this, do me a favour. Stop sending those stupid e-mails that tell me what kind of girl I like based on what drink I like based on what colour I like, or what I'm like based on my horoscope, or that some girl was killed and the ghost will haunt me, or that some poor baby suffering from some weird sickness nobody has even heard of will get money if I mass forward the e-mail, or that it will make me Bill Gates' new BFF.

None of those are real. Please. Just stop. You would expect that in this day and age the level of ignorance would be lower but the real world only makes your expectations drop again and again.