I work with a guy who is the king of forwarding me messages that I’ve already seen with an “FYI” note attached. He’s also quite good at sending me an e-mail that someone else just sent me. Often he and I will be sent an e-mail with someone asking one or both of us a question. He will, two seconds later, forward that e-mail to me asking the answer to the question. Why thank you, King Redundancy, I saw that e-mail because it was, oh, addressed to me, but your sending it again makes my response doubly fast and doubly correct!
One of the most hilarious offenses occurred yesterday. Someone sent my manager and I an e-mail asking a question, I replied to all with an answer, and my manager replied by saying she agreed with me. This e-mail was then forwarded to King Redundancy who was apparently the one who wanted to know in the first place, then he --that’s right!-- forwarded the e-mail to me, the one who answered the question he asked, with a note that said “FYI.”
What is his problem? He also once forwarded me an e-mail sent to “All Staff” with an FYI note. I replied, “I am copied on e-mails sent to all staff.” I was dying to know what his response would be, but he did not respond. So I was telling a friend/co-worker of mine about him, and she said I should start forwarding him random e-mails and type “FYI.” Stupid employee communications e-mails and the like that we all get, and just leave an FYI note and nothing else. That idea strikes me as hilarious, and I think I shall put it into use. Also, another suggestion was next time he FYIs me on the question I answered, I should forward it back to him and say “Just wanted to make sure you saw this.”
So a few minutes ago, we got a generic company announcement e-mail. I’m going to send it to him.
My bosses love doing this to me. We’ll get an E-mail from a company with documents attached, and our addresses are all clearly displayed in the To: line. Later on it shows up in my inbox, again, from one of them with a “take care of this” message tacked on the top. Geez, if you’re going to assume I don’t know I should take care of it, could you please not forward the attachments too? Looking at who it’s been sent to will show that I got it!
It seems even more likely that the attachments will get forwarded along if they’re of extremely large size. Hooray for mailbox quota warnings…
I wonder if your e-mail system has the capability of modifying an “out of office” mode to just him so that EVERY e-mail he sends to you immediately bounces back to him with an FYI response.
I don’t know what e-mail client you are using, but there is a function in MS Outlook that allows you to automatically set up rules for receiving email. I use them to shuffle my advertisements directly to a folder so I don’t clutter up my inbox. You could set up a rule to forward emails from him right back to him. (It’s under Tools/Rules and Alerts).
hmmmm…maybe he has already done that to you. Is he snickering every time you groan about an email you receive?
I get this sort of idiocy from boss-types. The department head will send something to an entire division. The division head will then resend the same email to the entire division again. And sometimes the supervisors in the division will send it a third time.
Could be worse - they could be doing it all on paper…
I had a boss once who printed out all her emails, and kept them in a binder. And if she got one she wanted us to see, she would, of course, print it and make copies for all of us (usually including whoever it was that sent it to her).