Ever really cocked up on an email ?

[giveusfalmerplease]

I haven't but we had a classic once at work a few years back as follows:

Somehow, I think in error by doing (*) or something a mail got sent to everyone in the company, 90,000 odd employees, by someone who was working in Nigeria as we were owned by an oil exploration company at that time.

Anyway this person wrote this mail to everyone saying I was promised this office in Nigeria and it has never materialised who do I contact ?

So everyone slowly replies all clogging up the mail server sending 90,000 odd mails along the line of sorry not my department, can't help you etc.

Then the Senior Vice President replied all "stop replying to this mail as it is going to everyone in the company", only some **** in France replied all saying "Which email ?"

Needless to say email keeled over after an hour or so for the rest of the day.

Thats amazingly common . Someone sends email to group of about 1000 people. They then reply to all saying "please remove me from distribution" By lunchtime over 100 mails on the same subject including several with the classic "please stop replying to all" doing precisely that!. All goes quiet then you come in in the morning to another 150 copies after the US team wakes up and starts responding to the same mail

 

[Wrong-Direction]

Thats amazingly common . Someone sends email to group of about 1000 people. They then reply to all saying "please remove me from distribution" By lunchtime over 100 mails on the same subject including several with the classic "please stop replying to all" doing precisely that!. All goes quiet then you come in in the morning to another 150 copies after the US team wakes up and starts responding to the same mail

Crikey the life of a pen pusher

Sent from my SM-A310F using Tapatalk

 

[Gwylan]

I've not done anything disastrous personally but I was once accidentally emailed a spreadsheet with the salary details of every person in the company. I was fascinated to discover that I was paid considerably less than someone on the same level as me ... something I raised with my manager a few days later. I got a pay rise the next month.

 

[FatSuperman]

Thats amazingly common . Someone sends email to group of about 1000 people. They then reply to all saying "please remove me from distribution" By lunchtime over 100 mails on the same subject including several with the classic "please stop replying to all" doing precisely that!. All goes quiet then you come in in the morning to another 150 copies after the US team wakes up and starts responding to the same mail

One week after the storm, some genius returns from holiday...

 

[W.C.]

Awkwardness today.

Someone emailed me for the second time late yesterday afternoon, chasing up some numbers that I hadn't got round to sending (probably too busy on here). I was almost on my way out of the door, so I just rattled off a quick reply which said:

"Sorry I didn't respond to your precious email, I'll come back to you first thing tomorrow", sent it, and logged off.

Obviously I meant PREVIOUS not PRECIOUS. So I got in this morning to a rather snarky reply from him which just said "Nice attitude".

I've had to call him and apologise, with my feeble explanation that it was honestly just a typo. I don't know him very well though, so I'm not sure he was convinced. This is probably the second most embarrassing thing to have happened to me in this office this calendar year. I hate emails.

*sigh*

That's an EXCELLENT typo, but so obviously one. Why did he get his knickers in a twist about it?

 

[um bongo molongo]

Thats amazingly common . Someone sends email to group of about 1000 people. They then reply to all saying "please remove me from distribution" By lunchtime over 100 mails on the same subject including several with the classic "please stop replying to all" doing precisely that!. All goes quiet then you come in in the morning to another 150 copies after the US team wakes up and starts responding to the same mail

You're not wrong - I used to work here and my email inbox looked like the photo for days...
http://metro.co.uk/2014/05/23/giveg...ands-greg-heaslip-free-trip-to-vegas-4738055/

 

[biddles911]

I took over as interim CEO of a small trade association a few years ago and had to pull the staff together pretty quickly as the previous CEO had left them pretty demoralised.

All pretty good bar the office junior who was useless and incapable of carrying out the simplest instructions without cocking up.

I asked her for an update on the few mini-projects I'd set her and, as usual, no progress had been made per the email I got back.

I decided to forward it to my number two expressing my irritation (quite politely) but suggesting she really ought to go as she was a positive liability.

But yes, you guessed it, I pressed reply rather than forward so the junior got it too!

Made for a rather difficult interview to apologise to her but explaining the problems we had.

She went anyway though....


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Easy 10]

That's an EXCELLENT typo, but so obviously one. Why did he get his knickers in a twist about it?

He's fairly new, we've not met or conversed much, he works in another office. If it was someone I deal with regularly then it would've been treated as a bit of a laugh I'm sure, and I TRIED that with him on the phone but he was a real cold fish about it. So I thought 'ahh bollocks then' and left it at that.

Life goes on.

 

[W.C.]

He's fairly new, we've not met or conversed much, he works in another office. If it was someone I deal with regularly then it would've been treated as a bit of a laugh I'm sure, and I TRIED that with him on the phone but he was a real cold fish about it. So I thought 'ahh bollocks then' and left it at that.

Life goes on.

Some people eh?

 

[Harry Wilson's tackle]

You fatherbed your colleagues? Interesting.

the e on my laptop has been viciously damaged by my attempts to fix the moderate damage inflicted by Mrs T's ham fisted typing. I try to fix the errors but my success rate is not prfect.

 

[Whoislloydy]

When I worked in construction i accidentally emailed a site manager instead of a colleague about going out for beers, he did reply quite jokingly and said he'd love to but it's a long drive from Glasgow to Lancing.

On another note, a current colleague was talking the other day about the time she email the person she was bitching about

 

[Harry Wilson's tackle]

Thats amazingly common . Someone sends email to group of about 1000 people. They then reply to all saying "please remove me from distribution" By lunchtime over 100 mails on the same subject including several with the classic "please stop replying to all" doing precisely that!. All goes quiet then you come in in the morning to another 150 copies after the US team wakes up and starts responding to the same mail

Happened here a year ago. I may have added to the soup by sending 'are you all mad?' after several dozen idiotic emials had been sent.

Meanwhile a high level administrator with the same name as me was appointed a few months ago, and I am being ccd into some of his emails. For the moment I am content to let this pass . . . . it has.... potential.

 

[Biscuit]

I once set an out of office saying I was WTF - obviously meant WFH. That's my pathetic contribution to this magnificent thread,

 

[WATFORD zero]

A long while back (mid-late 80s?) I worked for one of the big 4 banks and we introduced a mainframe e-mail system. Being the latest technology and new to everyone there were a multitude of mishaps but two i remember particularly

At about 11 at night I got a phone call from the IT Director in a rather agitated state. He had sent me an e-mail moaning about the finance director with various expletives and sent it to her by mistake. I got one of the on-call guys (one i trusted !) to go in, sign into her e-mail account and delete the said e-mail. Unfortunately to do this he had to change her password. Next morning as I walked in she was on the phone to the help desk insisting that there was no was she had mistyped her password 3 times. Close call but got away with it.


Second one, one of my staff came into my office gleefully holding an e-mail that had come off our office printer. It was from a female to a male acquaintance on another floor. Amongst the phrases i remember were 'your throbbing manhood between my breasts' and 'wet just thinking about last night'. The male acquaintance had then decided to print this and, unfortunately, had managed to change the destination printer from the one sitting on his desk.

I did what any right thinking person would do and told them to send it back to the gentleman in question in the internal post. Unfortunately (for anyone who remembers old style internal post) the evidence that the envelope had been in the IT department immediately prior was there for all to see. As I told the HR director, I've no idea who put it in the internal post, but if he was stupid enough to print it then there was little i could do

 

[Easy 10]

Second one, one of my staff came into my office gleefully holding an e-mail that had come off our office printer. It was from a female to a male acquaintance on another floor. Amongst the phrases i remember were 'your throbbing manhood between my breasts' and 'wet just thinking about last night'. The male acquaintance had then decided to print this and, unfortunately, had managed to change the destination printer from the one sitting on his desk.

I did what any right thinking person would do and told them to send it back to the gentleman in question in the internal post. Unfortunately (for anyone who remembers old style internal post) the evidence that the envelope had been in the IT department immediately prior was there for all to see. As I told the HR director, I've no idea who put it in the internal post, but if he was stupid enough to print it then there was little i could do

That is BRILLIANT

Just imagining the horror that must've descended on that guy when the print didn't arrive on his printer and had gone elsewhere. I'd be in cold sweats.

 

[Papa Lazarou]

My first foray into the London IT market was with a niche trading & settlement company called Synopsys (they don't exist anymore).

We had this odd rule that in order to send emails outside of the company you had to put an '=' sign as the 1st symbol in the subject line. If you tried to send an email out without this the email bounced back with a notification.

I was managing the UAT of the upcoming release (this was before the days of Good etc) and in order to keep an eye on progress one evening I decided to setup a forward of any emails I received to my personal email account.

Well, clearly I forgot to add the '=' in the rule and as soon as I got an email it tried to send it out, it bounced back and so began an infinite loop of emails. Now, clearly not everyone in the company SAW them, but they saw the impact, as I had close to 200k of emails on the server by the morning. Luckily I was in early and the IT manager was a good bloke, so were able to clean up the mess before it affected the owners!

 

[Jimmehh]

Did he have a point though?

No he was just being a d*ck

 

[black & white seagull]

I once received a press release from a battery manufacturer. The press release claimed that three million women in the UK use vibrators, and they would save a lot of money if they used this brand's rechargeable batteries. (I worked for a photography magazine, which shows how well targeted the press release was.)

Entertainingly, the PR account manager's name was Fanny. So I forwarded said press release to my sister, with a message that was something along the lines of 'ha ha ha... vibrators... Fanny'.

Except I didn't hit forward - I hit reply.

 

[Adders1]

Back in the early noughties i used to work in a new accounts call centre for a large multinational credit card provider, lets just call them our sponsor. Back then they used Windows NT and the command prompt was still available via the Start menu, so you could send a pop up message by typing 'net send <username>'

One of the team was a young lad of about 18 or 19 whom no one else liked, fancied himself a bit and was a compulsive liar (on the
books at the Albion, was a millionaire / only working for fun etc).

We also had a very predatory middle aged bald guy managing us who quite liked him and believed his cockwaddle.

Anyway one afternoon some of the team decided they would wait for him to be on the phone with a client and barrage him with pop up messages (you had to click 'ok' for them to go away manually)

The poor lad spent the next 3-4 minutes making excuses to the customer as to why he couldnt access their account as he was peppered with a barrage of "why dont you press ok?' 'Surely youre better than Guy Butters' and some other light hearted stuff. Until one of the guys took it too far and started sending messages about said predatory bald manager....unfortunately at the moment that 'Andrew wants to smash your back doors in you big bender' (copied and pasted aboit 20 times) came up on his screen, manager walked over to see what was going on.

Some of us didnt get sacked though

 

[Tom Hark Preston Park]

When I worked in the City, I once got about a thousand I LOVE YOU emails from the head of the London Stock Exchange. Which I found a bit forward. I mean, I'd never even met the bloke.