This happened in ICQ, not email, but I thought it was funny. At the company where my husband and I worked there was this…um…bitch. She was horrible to everyone, was certain she was right about everything, you know the drill. I could hardly even be in the same room with her. One day she pulled me aside in the hall to tell me that while she knew that everyone liked me, and that even though no one seemed to like her, she was going to turn that around. If I wanted anyone to be nice to me, I’d better start telling everyone how wonderful she was. WTF? I went to the CEO and bitched quite a bit. Nothing much transpired, so I just went back to ignoring her.
Then the most wonderful thing happened. My husband, who was the VP of Product Development, received an ICQ from her. It said something to the effect that he was horrible and all he wanted was for her to blow him, etc. It was obviously meant for someone else. When he got it, he called me over to his desk to read it. I laughed so hard because I knew that finally she was out of here. She apologized immediately, tried to make light of it, etc. She even called him seven times that day, but he never took her calls. Sure enough she was fired three days later.
In college, we were able to send mail to people within the university by just typing the name part of the address. However, all of our “names” were confusing little jumbles of letters like “cualb” or “cubrt12”, etc (it was cu+your initals and then numbers if more than one person shared your initals). It was pretty easy to confuse them as opposed to actually typing out a name. Anyway, someone once wrote to me just asking how I was doing. I wrote back to her about how things were and how my girlfriend had broken up with me. The next day I got an email from some other girl saying “I think you mean this for someone else. But I didn’t read it, so don’t worry. P.S. Sorry to hear about your girlfriend.”
Actually, it cracked me up and I wrote back to in some light hearted manner. We wound up writing back and forth for most of the semester though we never did meet each other or even try to.
I’ve had one e-mail address that is apparently very close to a few other people’s. So much so that I was receiving several mis-directed messages/week for a while.
However, there wasn’t really anything embarassing. I got one saying “Hey Rob, it’s that girl from camp,” with an accompanying picture and such. Most of them I just send a message back within a day or so to tell them that they’ve got the wrong address.
There was one e-mail, though, that I got back to right away. It was a schedule for someone who was departing to the airport a while after I got the message. Got back to that one right away, so as to make sure the intended recipient wasn’t standing around waiting for someone who wasn’t coming.
I wrote an email to a friend telling her how I laid a guilt trip on another friend to get her to let me use her car - but accidentally sent it to the girl I was talking about. Amazingly, I was able to talk my way out of this one, claiming it was a joke. It only worked because we had been talking about a misdirected email the other day.
The most embarassing was not an email, but an instant message. I was IMing a girl to ask her what the funny phrase was she used to describe her best friend’s prominently erect nipples (it was ‘breastacular’, I was thinking ‘nippleriffic’). Unfortunately, I forgot that I had sent a net send to the entire network last time and forgot to change the address, so it went out to everyone. The pointy girl IMd me to tell me the correct answer.
" . . . and accidentally included the address of the mother of one of our clients. This particular mother is very snooty and upper-crust, and tends to not have much of a sense of humor."
—I have this wonderful mental image of Margaret Dumont opening her E-mail, seeing this, and dropping her lorgnette into her tea, going “well, REALLY!”
