I’ve ranted about ubiquitous hoax emails before. They drive me nuts. Today’s rant is an entry under the header of: Ignornance, fighting. mob, angry.
My husband, who works for a very large company, received, in the company email, a missive about generic missing girl, OMG!!1! If we use the power of the intarwebs, we can find her!! He, of course, being the astute observer he is, and husband to a doper, says to himself, “Self, this is bullshit. There’s no mention of a police contact number, no location, no nothing. I’m going to fight a little ignorance today.” So he went to snopes, found the link, and prepared to send it to the offender in question.
Instead of sending it to just the offender, it looked on the header as if this email had gone to his branch. Since he outranks most of the people there, he decided to “reply all” and make sure that this kind of thing is nipped in the bud. His reply said simply, “Please check your sources before sending this kind of thing out to dozens of people.” and provided the link to the lowdown on the story.
Wouldn’t be a big deal except…
The offender didn’t just send it out to his branch. Oh no. The stupid bint sent it on a bcc to the entire company. Thousands of people. Thousands of people including the highest executive to the lowest pissant with an email address.
Funny you say? Yes, that’s what I thought, too. I thought it was pretty hilarious until he started receiving replies back like the following:
“Although this was a hoax, it seems to pale in comparison to your lack of character demonstrated by your critical email sent to all of *** Construction.”
“Dozens? How about thousands? Your reply was obviously unnecessary and rude. He had good intentions at least- you clearly did not.”
Lack of character for sending an email to all of the company, eh? Perhaps a pause to reflect on the character of some braindead fuckwit who has enough time on her hands to be screwing around with her personal email and then bothering thousands of people with outright untruths is in order?
As far as good intentions go, haven’t you heard, you tiny minded twat puncher, that good intentions pave the road to hell? Way to help push bonafide dumbfuckery around the globe!
Woe is me, fellow dopers, that these are the things that peeve me so. I told my husband that I was proud of him for trying, even though he totally fucked up by sending it to a whole company of people. The only thing that makes either one of us feel better about the whole thing is that he’s gotten twice as many calls from people who said, “Dude! You are the man! I’ve wanted to say something, but I was too chickenshit to be such an asshole. Thanks!”
Good intentions…grumble…eat a stolen dick, you wanton dunce whore.
I think your husband handled this one expertly. What is it about e-mail that people think it’s perfectly fine to spread unsubstantiated gossip, etc.? I mean, would you call everyone in your office with this kind of info?
My aunt, bless her heart, got hold of my non-business e-mail (thank God it wasn’t the school account) and sends me those Christian chain e-mails all the freakin’ time. The last one that went out was a warning for some virus, and to keep the virus from infecting one’s computer - all one had to do was install the attached file!
At least in the business world there’s a pretty well defined line between appropriate and inappropriate. This e-mail was clearly inappropriate. In academic settings, these things blur much easier. I usually get the “[Insert famous White celebrity] said that Black people are stupid!” e-mail, as well as the “The Post Office is canceling Kwanzaa stamps unless we buy them” e-mails twice a year.
Let’s face it, the majority of people who inhabit this planet with us aren’t all that bright when it comes to deductive reasoning and common sense. Good rant.
But… doing a Reply All would NOT include any recipients who had been BCCed the first time around, so either your (well-intentioned and awesome) husband mistakenly included the rest of the company, or they were there all along and he hadn’t noticed.
Anyway, it’s not unusual for people to take umbrage at being corrected, but how frustrating to be taken to task for correcting someone ELSE! Arrgh!
I like the pitting, there is a technical issue that makes me wonder about whether we’re getting the whole story.
It must have been a cc (not a bcc) to the whole company, because bcc recipients would not get your husband’s reply, even if he did “reply to all”. No recipient can see bcc recipients, otherwise it’s not a bcc, it’s just a cc.
In other words, “Reply To All” replies to the original sender and all CC recipients, but NOT to BCC recipients. It CAN’T, because the email client sending the reply has NO access to the list of BCC recipients.
On the technical stuff, yeah. You’re probably absolutely right. That was my take on how it happened, and I’m not exactly a computer expert. What he did say was that the email appeared to only be going to the branch. I deduced (incorrectly) how that happened. I do not have an explanation. :o
It’s entirely possible that she did. I’m not ranting about those. I’m ranting about trying to squelch stupidity and having someone come down on you for it.
Does it change my rant any if the original sender DID get some angry replies? I’m willing to bet that the two people whom I used as examples here didn’t have anything bad to say to the original sender, based on their defense of her.
Even if they had, so what? DH still got his pee-pee whacked by someone who thinks it’s more important to let lying dogs sleep than stop rampant bullshit in its tracks.
The “Reply To All” function got to be such a problem at Big Souless Corp. where I work that, per company-wide policy, the default in Outlook is to not have that button visible. If you want to reply to all, you have to use the shortcut keys or the drop-down menu. This was after a flurry of bogus virus warnings and responses (about 45 e-mails by the time it was over) went out to thousands of people in the span of a morning.
This, unfortunately, has not stopped helpful people from sending warnings about flaming hand sanitizer (keep all your flaming hands germ free!) to facility-wide distribution lists.
A manager in another department sent out an email to the entire division warning us the dioxins in plastic will leach out and poison us when it is filled with food and heated in the microwave. He’s a manager and I am but a Senior Engineer but I couldn’t let it go. I replied back to the whole division that it was a hoax with the appropriate Snopes link.
The manager sent back a sheepish reply about not forwarding stuff from his sister anymore. I got a few positive emails and some thumbs up in the hall way that day. No negative comments at all. Of course, Manager’s email wasn’t about OMFG Teh Children!!!111!
The UPS uniforms hoax got massive distribution through a 5,000+ employee company sent out by the VP of operations. I too grabbed the snopes link and mailed it back to the VP, someone I would normally need about 3 layers of authorization to even think about speaking to. No CC’s, just to him. He sent out another email a few minutes later stating that he had discovered that the email warning was a hoax and a thank you to Drachillix in Fresno for leading him to information to confirm it. :eek:
About 10 min after that my boss drags me in wanting to know WTF I was thinking emailing VP Ops. I told him I emailed only the VP, meaning if he chose to ignore it, fine. If he chose not to mention me, fine. IMHO he appreciated what I did by allowing him to save face if he chose to, rather than the OP’s blanket reply which basically made said boss look like a dumbass to the company as opposed “on followup we have discovered this not to be true.”
If anything OP’s hubby’s only mistake was not allowing the boss the opportunity to correct his own mistake and took the initiative to fix it for him.
I wonder: Was there a group name in the CC line, rather than a list of individual email addresses? Perhaps someone in IT had set up a group for the entire company to enable emailing of companywide alerts, and somehow the credulous dingbat had gotten hold of it and used it to ship out the missing-girl glurge. Hitting Reply All would send his email to everyone in that group.
Turns out, that’s exactly what happened. The header said X#branch, so the Mr. figured it was just his branch that got it. Nope.
Also, it wasn’t a case of correcting the boss. The person in question is a peon somewhere. DH is higher on the food chain than the sender, but not everyone who got it.
I will never forget when a guy at the company I used to be the IT director at sent out the UL about having your kidneys removed and waking up in a tub of ice. I nearly pissed my pants laughing and we had to implement a “no more mass e-mails” rule. Man alive. He sent it to everyone, President of the company on down.
The last one was an alleged rant by a Fortune 500 CEO that was “leaked.” He went on about how Black people are stupid, spend all of their money on disposable goods, and are all too willing to be led by stupid slogans and ad campaigns, even those that denigrate them.
I knew it was fake from the get-go. I’ve heard this “look at how we behave” line of reasoning before, and one line in particular got me - a fake statistic about how much Black people spend during the holidays. It a) was actually a reasonable statistic, in my mind, not surprising at all, as well as b) not presented with a statistic about the the population writ large or White folks. So how do we know that Black people are behaving particularly materialistically during the holidays?
When I posed these questions to the folks included on the message, at least three or four agreed that it was bullshit. Turns out some “comedian” used this rant onstage. Somehow, I think the days of smoking gun memos and e-mails with racist rants are over. Black people (and our allies) actually sit on boards and chief executive positions nowadays. If Tommy Hilfinger or Liz Claiborne hate Black people, it’s going to be a little more subtle than that…
After the London tube terrorist bombings a team member at my work decided to send an email to our team.
The email read something like " My friend’s friend’s father works as a station master at Flinders St Railway station. They have heard that there will be a terrorist attack this Friday afternoon. Please tell all your friends."
I confronted him in person about said email. I asked him what he intended to achieve by sending it out. I tried to get him to think about the consequences of sending out such shite.
Needless to say there was no terrorist attack nor any evidence, police reports etc that an atatck was ever thought about by any ‘terrorists’.
I work at a rather large company and the other day I found a basket set aside for soda can tabs near the recycling. This one was for chemotherapy rather than dialysis but at this point you’d almost have to be willfully ignorant to collect tabs…
I once recieved a similar set of responses after doing the same “Send back a snopes link” bit…
This was the “teddy bear icon” thread a few years ago. Those that listened in my office had no computer issues. Those that chose to ignore me were down for a few hours while I “got around” to fixing their screw-ups.
The sender of the email paid for my time to repair all the computers in my office that broke. (Her cost center did anyway).
Ignore the moron responses. Your hubbie did the right thing.
