The e-mail heard round the world
Lawyers are supposed to be smart, which is why it can be really amusing when they do something downright stupid. Fortunately I'm not speaking from personal experience, since I've never been guilty of anything that would fall in the category of "stupid," and I invite anyone to challenge me on this point. A little while ago, however, one of my colleagues in our London office accidentally sent an e-mail to the entire firm by erroneously using a global distribution address in the "To" list. Unintentionally e-mailing the entire firm, though not the most intelligent to do, wouldn't have merited a blog entry. Personally I thought the mistake was rather amusing, but I deleted the e-mail and let it go. That's when the fun started.
Eight minutes after I received the initial e-mail I started getting responses from all over the globe (Frankfurt, Madrid, Hong Kong, Moscow, Tokyo, etc.) asking to be taken off the distribution list. One or two e-mails sent in response to the entire firm I could have understood, but in the course of seven minutes I had received 19 of them, and God only knows how many had been sent to the original author. Within an hour the total number of global replies had jumped to 123. To put that into perspective, multiply 123 by all of the people included in the global list (roughly 6000) and you'll understand how busy our servers got in a hurry.
Of course, some of the responses were intended to stop people from replying or were written with tongue in cheek, such as the following:
"And now, instead of one message sent by mistake, we all have a dozen. Thanks."
"And now, instead of one message sent by mistake, we all have a dozen. Thanks."
"What a world tour!"
"MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL ...... PLEASE STOP!!!!"
"Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!"
"What's brown and sneaks around the kitchen? Mince Spies."
And my favorite: "No, no keep going. Lets see if 3000 people respond..."
Who were these people? Some of them were receptionists, support staff and other non-attorneys, but a disappointing proportion were my brothers and sisters in law (not Ariel, Nik and Young, mind you). To make it even more embarrassing, the office guilty of the most "Reply to all" mails was Paris (with 18). As a profession that prides itself on its discretion, trustworthiness and precision, shouldn't my colleagues have paid a bit more attention to what they were doing before they responded globally? Couldn't they have figured out by the dozens of other e-mails that it was a mistake in the first place and that in replying they would only be contributing to the error?
Truly this was a sad chapter in the history of the legal profession. If you'd like to try to make me feel better with your own stupid e-mail addressee story, please feel free to write it up in the comments section. Sighhhhh.
12 comments:
funny, i am glad this is not under 'why i blame eric'
My colleague once sent a massive spreadsheet with everyone's salary listed to everyone at Guidant. (N=3000 people.) Nice.
love the n=3000
OK, Rachel, that story beats mine and definitely helped make me feel better. Out of curiosity, how much longer did your colleague remain employed at Guidant?
Someone from our accounting office once accidentally mailed me a spreadsheet with the hours billed by everyone in the finance department for the entire year, so I got to see how much more I had worked than all but two of my colleagues. That just made me sad, though.
It doesn't compare with either Lee or Rachel's email stories, but when I was an undergraduate at UNC the person in charge of the biology lab sections was a graduate student named David Vandermast. His email address was only one letter off from mine: dbvander instead of dvander. For three years, I received panicked emails (mostly from freshmen) starting at about midnight the night before a lab report was due and asking questions about petri dishes and fetal pig hearts. What was even more fun were the invitations I would get from his friends to go clubbing or the wedding and baby announcements he was supposed to receive. Good times.
Why hasnt anyone mentioned times when Lee has been stupid? I was looking forward to mass comments about that, not about stupid emails. C'mon guys, now's OUR time. Pegs, I know you must have at least 2,436 of them. Mom, Dad, Vanessa, Derek...let's get to it. And of course Michael and Eric probably have much better ones than the family. Let the mayhem begin
One of the most annoying mass e-mails we get at work is from stores with the message, "Ft. Lauderdale's phones are down. We will let you know when the phones are functioning again." Don't they realize we will figure it out for ourselves that the phones are not working when we try to call and there is no answer?!? Plus, it's always the super-small stores that no one ever really needs to get in touch with, anyhow.
When I worked in HR I was always deathly afraid of sending a salary spreadsheet to the whole world. Lucikly it never happened.
If we're looking for stupid things that Lee has done, Damien, we can always go back to the time he got hit by a car while riding his bike. Or rather, he was riding his bike and hit a parked car.
You see, people, Lee was pretending to be a jockey in a horse race. And of course, horse jockeys look under their arm to look at the people behind them as they gallop toward the finish line. Concentrating so hard on achieving this daring feat of acrobatics and athleticism, Lee forgot to look ahead of him. As a result, he ran smack into the hood of a stationary station wagon and scraped his scalp against the pavement once he hit the ground. Apparently, they were digging little pebbles out of his head for the next hour or so...
Thankfully, he met Pegs the next year and she straightened him out but good.
Lee has been holding out, he never told me that story. That is going to provide hours, nay, days, of material for me. Thank you my sweet, sweet brothers-in-law.
Ok -- I have one more story to add. When my boyfriend of 9 months broke up with me this last August, I called one girlfriend in NYC for a shoulder to lean on before flying to Australia. While there, I got an email from a friend sending pictures from his recent travels in Peru. This same gal (the NYC one) accidently hit "reply all" to his email (like N=50 people from college I haven't talked to in 8 years) and she said (and I quote): "Lars, by the way, Rachel got dumped last week and it taking it way too hard. Just a heads up. C'est la vie, right? It isn't like it was serious or anything. It was less than a year." Nice. Especially when some guy named Umair from college emailed everyone back and said "I thought Rachel was gay?"
I'm really sorry to hear that someone would betray your confidences like that, Rachel, especially in such a crass and thoughtless manner.
For the record, though, I for one never thought you were gay. Lesbians generally don't spend nearly as much time staring at my toned tight buttocks or my rippling abdominal muscles. They prefer to linger interminably in the deep, mysterious pools of my eyes....
Rachel, that's absolutely horrible. I'm sorry this person was such a stupid, mean douche.
Lee, lesbians are fascinated with your eyes because they are convinced that if they wait long enough, they will either pop out of your head in a moment of excitement or they will at least start blinking at the same time. In fact, it's not just lesbians that stare because of that.
Also, beyond your eyes lesbians are enamored with your mammary-esque pectorals.
Snap!
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