UKC

Well, it took me two decades but I have finally managed to pop my "Reply All" disaster email cherry...

"Well, as random emails from nutcase go that’s a goodie. Don't respond. He's clearly a complete nutjob and after some sort of validation".

Glad I cc'd him in on that one then...

I'm sure you've managed better though.

b

In reply to ben b:






The one where you send a text message about someone to that person. I did that twice in a row once while planning a night out in my first year of university...

"Please don't invite Person A, I'm starting to find him pretty weird" - sent to Person A

2 minutes later...

"Bugger, I just sent Person A a message saying not to invite him cos I find him weird" - sent to Person A

In reply to ben b:

Brilliant.

The last place I worked gave out a "Taps award" for this sort of thing. It consisted of two golden bathroom taps set into a nice bit of wood. Taps stands for Thick As Pig Sh*t!

Hope you recover the situation.

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:

My old place had a "Fish" award, after someone replied all to a company wide email asking for Christmas party menu choices with "I WILL HAVE THE FISH!"

In reply to Trevers:

That's excellent

b

In reply to ben b:

Like Trevers, not an email but a text.

I sent a text to Mrs J ending it 'xxx', as you do.... except I sent it to Enty... who was standing next to me... he gave me one of those raised eyebrow looks...

In reply to jon:

One of my colleagues, who is just the nicest person you could ever meet, rang a customer’s mobile and it went straight to voicemail. So he left a message but went into some kind of autopilot mode towards the end and finished by saying “Ok. Love you. Bye.” The look of horror on his face as he hung up the phone and it dawned on him what he’d done will stay with me forever!

In reply to jon:

Good work!

A colleague accidentally signed off a text to his secretary with "love you sweetie x x x" having just been talking to his wife - on Valentine's day too. My goodness we took the piss out of him for that...

b

In reply to ben b:

Not an email but a voice conference with a cast of thousands. After about 10 minutes of us all getting harangued by a particularly obnoxious individual I pressed the mute button on my phone and exploded with 'I can't stand that F-ing guy'

I had been on mute before and I had just accidentally un-muted the phone

In reply to ben b:

sent out a doctored spoof mail about a colleague to the rest of my team (who it turns out was a bit "fragile" anyway)
boss replies "F***ing ace big man - best thing I've seen - she's a F***ing t**t anyway"
a few team mates concur with various derogatory comments (all worse than my original mail which was tongue in cheek funny at best)
turns out I'd "replied all" to a Global mailing list and the mail went to over 100k employees inc the CEO....that one cost me my next 2 promotions!
that was 10 years ago and to this day I'm very very careful around "reply all" and mailing lists

In reply to dbapaul:

I was on a Global video presentation with a number of my team as well as several dozen others across the globe...I had a particularity sleazy team mate at the time who was always making gross and sexist remarks....anytime we were on a call and a female came on, he'd instantly fire up her Facebook and start going through her pictures
so he does his usual and is looking at pics of this girl in a beach pose and fires me an IM to the effect that he'd bang her senseless and various other remarks....

He'd forgotten he was was sharing his screen with everyone at the time - no longer with the company now but a leg end no less

In reply to ben b:

My wife sent a text to a colleague of hers saying a lot of stuff but specifically "having an affair with Jim last summer was the maddest baddest thing I've ever done".

Except she didnt send it to her colleague and
my names not Jim and she's not my wife any more!

In reply to ben b:

I love reply all. Never fallen foul of it but it has helped me out.
A couple of years ago an area manager sent me a very snotty email asking why his Air compressor was beyond economical repair after an internal seal had failed causing it to drop it's oil and why didn't I change thus seal during the routine maintenance I did 3 months earlier.

He sent that to me and copied in all the other area managers, the senior engineeris, his boss and his bosses boss and a few high ups in procurement.

I hit reply all and explained that my remit on routine maintenance covered oil, filters and drive belts for a grand total of £180.00 on that particular machine but should he wish to instruct me to check and replace the internal seals on a annual basis I am quite happy to do so.
The cost breakdown was roughly.
£800 x 2 for a crane to remove it and re install.
£4000.00 for a full overhaul kit
£1000.00 labour.
There are 3 machines on this site so does he want all 3 doing?
Does he want this scheme rolling out across the other 500 machines that my company looks after for them?

I got a phone call from the head of engineering within 10 mins of sending my reply.
I was quite worried when I answered the phone but I was met with lots of laughter and I could hear the entire Office laughing as well.
His words were, exactly "nice one, you made him look a right TxxT, what a CxxT. I have just accidently copied in the entire engineering department on to the email chain to show him up for the FxxKwit that he is"

I love reply all.

In reply to Gone for good:




And we have a winner. Respect for posting.

In reply to Liam42:

That'd be a lot funnier told from your "fragile" colleagues perspective IMO.

In reply to ben b:

Reply-all to an email to entire department about potential numbers for a Christmas lunch - something aside from the main company bash (I forget exact wording, but you get the idea):

"No, thanks - there's only a couple of people that I'd want to spend any time with socially"

In reply to ben b:

Our best was one a little 'meta'. It started out as either a virus or a really vague e-mail called INVOICE with a PDF attachment. It was sent to the 'all company' mailing list which is several thousand people or more.

A few people replied all saying "I think you've sent this to the wrong person"

Then a few more replied say "Please stop replying to all"

The echoes took several days to die out.

In reply to ben b:
I was emailed a call for papers for conference that I thought my husband might be interested in - so I forwarded it to him. As well as the conference details, I included a few intimate, affectionate greetings and salutations. Was surprised to receive another email, almost immediately from the conference organiser saying "I think you meant to forward this, not reply to me."

In reply to ben b:

Managed to avoid any mishaps yet....

I don't do "reply all" or "cc". Slows thing down a bit but causes me to think.

And don't get me started on inappropriate comments on bookface by members of staff.

In reply to Removed UserDeleted bagger:

I'm still amazed that people don't seem to have cottoned on to the fact that most companies look at job candidates' Facebook profiles as part of the shortlisting process.

In reply to Oujmik:

Can probably do better than that.

I received an email from a very large company only saying 'Can you please provide your Reconciliation Statement', the email was sent to all suppliers to the large company. The story went something like this;

First response (replied to all) 'What is a Reconciliation Statement'
Second response (replied to all), 'I'd like to know as well'
Few more responses (replied to all)
About the 8th response someone got a bit fed up and replied to all 'Can everyone please stop replying to everyone!'
The floodgates then opened.
Two weeks later I had to ask for the fun to stop as the amount of emails I was receiving was causing me problems.

On the plus side I got several contracts that would have been unlikely had not happened.

The thing I most took away from the experience was that 'Accounts people' have too much time to waste.

In reply to ben b:

I was oncall overnight in the hospital and at about 5am ish had a phone call from a nurse asking for advice about a patient. I gave appropriate advice and instead of saying goodbye, I absent mindedly said 'love you darling...'. Put the phone down sharpish to weird looks from the doctors and nurses next to me.

Had to go straight to the other ward and the poor woman couldn't look me in the eye. Never has since either!

In reply to ben b:

I am the UK arm of a team working in Philadelphia, so I use Google chat (or whatever they are calling it now) to ask quick "hey, where is this file" type questions.

I have had a couple of comedy instances where I have had a chat window open to my boss and another open to my partner and confused them. I can't decide whether my boss was more confused by the request to go out for Vietnamese for dinner followed by kisses, or whether my partner was more confused about my rant about the bug in the workflow software which has still not been fixed...

In reply to ben b:

Not a "Reply all", but a group email at work recently got sent out with "Retards" rather than "Regards" at the end.....

Apt, I thought.

In reply to Chris Harris:

I must remember that "typo" for when people at work are really getting on my nerves.

In reply to ben b:

Back in the day I used to put on free parties and raves with a mate of mine. They were small scale and venues were always hard to come by. One time I managed to book the canteen at the insurance company I worked for for a 'birthday party' and then kitted it out with sound system, lights, strobes and smoke for an all nighter.

The security guards weren't greatly impressed as they hadn't been warned and word got round the town that a rave was on and we were descended upon by all and sundry.

Now you'd think people would have a bit more respect when you pay for them to party at your own expense but I think they were a couple of hundred fag burns in the carpet and the company security guards had finally had enough at about 4am when someone had broken into the chest freezer and was attacking people with a frozen leg of lamb.

Back at my desk on Monday morning and I receive a very stern email from the head of property services along with a very hefty bill. Being a little in denial about the trouble I was in i forwarded the email to a friend remarking to him about 'how much they had their knickers in a twist, and it was only a ******* party' except I'd clicked reply instead of forward. That feeling of dread at the realisation after clicking send is quite profound.

Somehow I managed to keep my job and shortly after the canteen was turned into meeting rooms.

In reply to Badgers:

Oh god - that reminds me... Back in the 90s when we still did the godawful 80 hour "weekends" I had finally crawled into the bed in the on call room sometime early sunday morning (up and working since friday 0800) and descended deep into the sleep of the dead. After about 30 minutes the pager went off and one of the nurses was asking about a post-op patient whose blood sugars were dropping dangerously. "Oh alright, can you get 50mls of 50% dextrose ready and I'll be along" I said, staggering out the room. I found the ward and indeed the patient on autopilot, administered the dextrose and walked back to the on call room wondering why all the nurses were being unusually giggly and a little flirty... (a fairly horrific prospect in some cases).

As I lay back on the bed I looked down and saw, with somewhat mixed feelings of embarrassment and a little frisson of pride, I had probably the most impressive erection of my life (well, I was young and vigorous in those days) that stood proud from my scrubs like a tent pole. It had clearly been there all the way through from being woken. These days I recognise that I was probably deep in slow-wave sleep and just on the border of rapid eye movement (no sniggering at the back) and just happened to get a complete diamond cutter at pretty much them moment the pager went off: frozen in time, the 5 minutes or so of vague consciousness needed for the task (50% dextrose has the consistency of treacle and is a complete sod to inject) was insufficient to dent it.

Twenty plus years on it remains somewhat embarrassing (a mate of mine married one of the nurses in the end and they still laugh about it), although less so than the occasion I felt up my future father-in-law the weekend I first met him... but that's another story

cheers

b

In reply to Chris Harris:


Just sprayed tea over the laptop screen there

I'm so going to have to do that...

cheers

b

In reply to jon:



I never do that. No text kisses ever.

If you don't do it to anyone, there is no chance you will make a mistake
( that can be taken the wrong way, by either the incorrect recipient , or your wife/ partner if they happen to find out about it)

In reply to ben b:

My company seems to be oblivious to what "Reply To All" actually means - Several times a year we'll get a circular where one person clicks "Reply To All" with a response, and then 20 people "Reply To All" to that response saying "Why Am I On This", and then 200 people all start clicking "Reply To All" saying "Stop Clicking Reply To All" and eventually the mail servers crash.

In reply to ben b:

We did once get a company wide email (I forget the subject), which my colleague commented on with some really 'derogatory' remarks about the top boss and then forwarded to me.

Bored...I copied the recipient list from the original mail into the 'to' header of his email (pasting over my name), replied back to him and said "urm, you do realise you replied to all and sent that to the entire company, don't you"

The absolute white faced, terror stricken panic face was a treat, even if it did only last 30 seconds until he went back to his Sent Items to check.

In reply to ben b:
A senior director in the multinational company I work for was corresponding with other seniors ( forwarded by their secretaries) on some sensitive subjects, including mistakes the seniors had made that cost a lot of money, and substantially more than had been intended, and even worse , they had misunderstood how long they had contracted for, and they were tied to repeat the same large expense for years.

To cover for that they were suggesting cutbacks in other areas that they did not want the staff to know about, and one of them was stopping the company magazine, however he concluded that that cutting that might alert the staff to some problems , so he suggested in his email that they keep that going, and look for cuts elsewhere. ( on the quiet)

His secretary had gone home, ( so we heard later) so he replied himself, but somehow included a 'GRP' email, which was sent several hundred staff in various locations.
Realising his mistake, he quickly tried to retrieve it, but as no one was expecting a mail from him, many naturally opened it right away( and some even printed it before it was retrieved) and it got widely circulated.

He, and other even more senior people , left the company not too long after.

In reply to Jim C:

Not a 'reply to all' situation, but had a bit of a back and forth email exchange with our IT department about a change I needed making which was fairly essential, but which was a little bit non-standard and they didn't really want to do it.

The mail trail went quiet for a while, then I got fowarded a response which happened to include all of their internal comments...one of which was "At the end of the day, just tell him it's tough f*cking sh*t and we can't do it"

Replied with an offended message telling them they might want to delete those type of comments frnm a customer email, let them sweat for 10 minutes and then went upstairs and had a chuckle with them...cos I know it's something I've almost done in error in the past...

In reply to ben b:

Few years ago I was working at the local council, and I was asked to send out an email to everyone explaining that the electric was going off for a few minutes so they should save their work and log off their computers. This I did, and all went smoothly, until I realised I had sent it to the whole council and not just our small site. A couple of hours later people in other sites were still sat around twiddling their thumbs waiting for the power to go out.