surrey jim
Not in Surrey
Can't believe I'm going to admit this. This happened several years ago.
I work in PR, and a colleague emailed me and asked for a list of contacts of which she would approach with and email a press release. I copied about 250 contacts (let's bear in mind this included national news and business editors) into the email rather than attach it in it's current form (an Excel doc) or paste it into the body of an email. So when I replied to her "just send it to these chumps", I copied in the 250 journalists...
You know when you instantly realise what you've done and you go all hot and get the empty feeling in your stomach. Multiply that by 10 and you'll get what I felt at that point. To know that 250 journalists had just received an email from me saying "just send it these chumps...". ****ing hell.
It wasn't long before the emails started to come in ripping it out of me and some national journalists can be quite precious and therefore quite spiteful. Joel Hills, high profile in my line of works on Sky News, commented on Twitter about how annoying my email was and got a lot of reaction from other journalists. A lot, I might add, were quite sympathetic towards me and told him to stop complaining. The problem was I think some of them thought I was a junior exec who was there on his first day when, in reality, I had actually just won a significant industry award and was doing ok'ish! In the end, I emailed them all individually and apologised unequivocally for my mistake. I must admit a lot of them came back and said it put a smile on their face and some even said that the journalists complaining "are just morons".
Needless to say I won't be doing that again.
Not sure what system you use for email. The outlook 'recall a message' has come in very handy in simalar situations to this, for me.