I would not contact the person directly, specifically because any direct contact with her would muddy the waters as it were. By forwarding the nasty-gram to my boss first I’m letting it stand on its own without any further communication between me and K allowing even the slightest possibility that I’m acting unprofessionally in response to her unprofessionalism. I forwarded the forward (with my comments to my boss) to K’s boss as a courtesy to my boss, so that she would not be perceived as coming in from another section and sandbagging on K. With both bosses fully informed, they can coordinate any response and I come off in the best possible light to both of them. In fact the first question my boss asked me about the situation was whether I had emailed K back. I explained that I hadn’t and had no intention of doins so and she said “good.”
I didn’t want to stick it to the sender (and the boss was on the distribution list). The sender and K are two different people. If it had been anyone other than K I wouldn’t have wanted to stick it to her either; it was the combination of incompetence and rudeness that led me to (I had spent a good chunk of my morning documenting her copious and foolish blunders).
Meh. Not worried about it in the slightest. K works in a different state from me. My boss loves me and the people I work with directly know I’m not a killjoy. I dressed up for Halloween in a skirt and fairy wings; I’m a Legend.
Oh I do. Part of my job is documenting the errors she and others in her position make and communicating them back to my boss so they can be fixed.
Muddy the waters? How does a ‘Hey I got your e-mail and I thought it wasn’t appropiate for work and would appreciate you not sending me any further’ muddy the waters? As long as you remain cordial, polite and professional you won’t be accused of anything other. If the cow-orker says sorry you’re right it was inappropiate I apologize its resolved to the benefit of both people. S/he gets to make amends for their fuck up without getting in shit with their boss. If the cow-orker repeats their glurge then you go to your boss. What you did was escalate an fuck up by your cow-orker without the decency of trying to resolve it like adults.
See this is exactly my point. You didn’t want to resolve the situation you wanted to stick it to someone you didn’t like. Grow up and act like an adult.
I never said it wasn’t I said the correct action would be to talk to the person and then go to your boss only. What he did was basically went and told on the cow-orker.
By sending it to the cow-orkers boss also it basically forces his and the cow-orkers boss to escalate the issue.
Boy, am I glad that England is largely free of patronising Christian holier-than-thou twonks.
I’d love to see the response if anyone sent an e-mail saying “I wonder if you even go to church” over here. (For the record, slightly fewer people go to church in England than play crown green bowls*).
Statistics may be complete bollocks. Consume at your own risk.
Any response by me to her turns it into a “he said she said” situation. No matter how polite or cordial I am to her in reply, it gives her the ability to point to it as “rude” or “inappropriate” or whatever, whether it was or not. Forgoing a direct response to her prevents her from deflecting attention off of her inappropriateness.
Have you never worked for an American corporation?
Oh, piss off. First off, “stick it” wasn’t my phrase. I simply repeated it. Second, if I were acting other than as an adult in this situation I’d have sent a shitty email back to the bigot who accused me of being defective for not believing in her sky-father and then the situation really would have escalated. Considering that my boss, who’s the one whose opinion actually matters here, thought I handled the situation appropriately, I’d say my adultitude is on steady ground here.
No, sending it to my boss forces the escalation. Sending it to K’s boss simply protects my boss from being accused of going into someone else’s department and chastising someone else’s employee without that employee’s boss knowing about it. K’s boss made the decision to act without waiting for input from my boss. Not my responsibility.
Bullshit its not deflecting anything its the polite and adult thing to do. Besides you still have the e-mail to send to your boss.
Thats not how adults act either. Adults try to work out their differences politely.
Did he say that or did he say it was ‘good’ you didn’t send an e-mail to the cow-orker?
Bullshit. You send the e-mail to your boss and let him decide. Your boss can foward the e-mail if he wants or he can do nothing if he wants. Once K’s bosses gets that e-mail he has no choice but to go and talk to K. You have in essence made a formal complaint without making any attempt to resolve the situation. Not to mention by sending it directly to K’s boss you bypassed your own boss. If I was your boss I would be pretty pissed about that. What if K’s boss is thinking the same thing I am and says the samething I am to your boss. Now your boss is in the middle of petty office bickering becuase you acted like a child.
K fucked up but you also fucked up when you went above K’s head without speaking to K first. This situation might have been resolved with a simple 2 minute polite conversation. Instead you decided to be a petty asshole and try to get K becuase of a childish grudge.
Reply that you don’t go to Church anymore after you witnessed someone leap off the church tower at Saint Obnoxious, land on your mother, and kill her. Now every time someone mentions church it reminds you of your dear departed mother. How could the sender be so cruel as to send you that mail when everyone knows about your history.
You don’t get it. Have you never been involved in a dispute with a co-worker? Here’s how it would play out if I responded to K. Her boss would talk to her, she would point to my email (regardless of what it said) and express how offensive she found it. Then the issue becomes not “K did something wrong and it needs to be addressed.” The issue becomes “K and Otto are involved in bickering and both need to be addressed.” Any response from me opens that door and allows her to dump some of the shit that rightly belongs on her doorstep onto mine.
Bullshit right back. K’s boss could have coordinated with my boss before taking any action. She chose not to, that’s not my responsibility. K’s boss could have resolved the situation by simply noting it and replying to me with something along the lines of “thank you for bringing this to my attention.” My forwarding it was a courtesy to my boss, and since you’re not inside my head your attempt at second-guessing my supposed sinister motive is laughable.
The resolution of the situation was to forward the insulting email to my boss and to forward it to K’s boss so they could coordinate a response if they chose. It’s not my job to discipline employees and it’s not my job to decide for a boss how to handle her underlings.
How the fuck did I bypass my boss when I sent it to her first? God damn what a dumbass thing to say.
Er, um, except that this isn’t what happened in reality. In reality where I live the situation was handled through the appropriate channels and resolved to my satisfaction. In reality my boss was satisfied with the way I handled the situation.
I repeat, piss off. You’re effectively invented a fantasy realm composed of what-ifs and might-have-beens which bears a resemblance to reality of exactly ZERO. You clearly have no fucking clue what you’re talking about. Which unfortunately is rarely if ever taken as a cue by the ignorant to shut the fuck up.
Meh. I’d say Otto did the right thing, on the pure basis that his boss thought it was appropriate. Companies have their own culture; some want your boss or HR to be notified of any indication of a hostile work environment, some want you to work it out with the offender, some want you to engage in a shiv fight with the offender. If talking to the offender about this isn’t really the right procedure, the boss isn’t going to be too happy with you when it finally does escalate with the situation even more entangled.
Personally, it seems like you did react a bit quickly from this outsider’s perspective, Otto, but if your boss is cool with it, that’s the only opinion that matters. Really, getting that kind of thing at work would definitely stick in my craw too, especially if the person taking a superior tone doesn’t do their job well. We’ve got a couple employees like that here, and none of the rest of us are at all fond of them.
Me thinks treis has been burned by sending retarded emails before.
We rarely have these sorts of emails sent to my department. Last time someone sent a department wide (only about 50 people) email about some “stupid guy doing a bungee stunt without the bungee”. After I asked around (actually asked here and my mom) it turns out it was probably a suicide in Japan some years back.
Duh. The sender hasn’t sent anything else like that since. Cute kittens are one thing, watching a guy die is another.
Where is your email administrator in all of this? Mass emails with animated graphics? The horror! Responding to the innappropriate mass email by replying all is bad. This should be brought to the attention of the email admin. The email admin should have a policy about this.
Never reply to glurge. It just encourages them more.
We had someone here send a 600K inspirational powerpoint slideshow (!) to the entire company. I reported her (in my capacity of IT manager) to her supervisor for misuse of computing resources, resulting in a formal warning. That’s the only proper response to office glurge, as far as I’m concerned.
To be fair my job requires me to send large (up to ~50 megs) of work related spread sheets to several people. Some groups (special ‘news’ people) sent out daily emails (mostly company-related annoucements) to all 30,000+ people in our company. Admin-level filtering isn’t going to work very well around here.
We do get the occasional new person (we’re a call centre) who’ll reply to all when asking some innane question. Really funny sometimes.
I am not advocating blanket restrictions on email size. I am saying that misuse of the email system should be reported. This is in part at least so it can be available to those who actually need to use it for business. I’d also bet that the 50 MB mails are not going out to 30,000 people everyday.
I don’t like blanket restrictions. As you noted, people need to do send to multiple recipients and send large attachments for reasonable business purposes. However, it is your email admin’s job to keep stats on the system use and make sure the system can handle its load. Massmailing glurge and responses to it can place unusual burden that may not be accounted for by your email admin. It also makes it seem like you need more capacity than you actually do.
You know for years as a child I thought Christians were Very Bad People who were allowed to be bad because they belonged to that special club. Yes, this is practically delusional, but I was very young and I had an experience that presented me with this logic: I was the only dark-skinned kid at a camp, some racist kids were picking on me terribly, but I didn’t understand their epithets (I’d never heard those insults before so they didn’t have any meaning to me at that age). The only thing I did understand was when one of them said “I bet you’re not even Christian!”
It’s really strange but that experience really affected the way I viewed the Christian church for most of my childhood, until I was old enough to know better.
Heh. Last year, my pagan ass had to send that out to all of our clients, along with a miniature candy cane. My only consolation was that my layout for the glurge was decently classy, and looked really kickass.
Well, that and I got the keep the extra candy canes.
I totally sympathize, though. For some reason, these kind of emails circulate at my work, too. . .but the people who send them out only send them to the other females on the team. I mean, the fact that I have tits, a twat, and two X chromosomes doesn’t mean that I like this kind of thing.
NEVER bother with Snopes, though; most people seem to think it’s condescending. Grr.
