I’ve been at my current company for quite some time, seeing it grow by about a factor of 50 in headcount. The transition between medium company to large carries certain amusements–one of them being the increasing cost of accidentally hitting “reply to all” when you really meant to reply to just one person.
Most people have probably made this mistake at some point or another, but it gets funnier when the entire employee mailing list has thousands of people on it.
IT eventually clamped down on this, and furthermore people caught on to using BCC, but not before we had some real gems. On to the examples:
Black Girls
We had a security breach a while back and a couple of teenage girls sneaked in and stole a few things. Security sent out an email with fuzzy pictures and a vague description. One employee replied to the email, saying that he had seen a pair of unaccompanied black girls wandering around. He had, of course, accidentally sent this to the entire company.
What an unbelievable amount of recreational outrage! Oh no, it couldn’t be that the guy had simply provided an accurate visual description of the intruders; he was racist for even mentioning their skin color. There was an endless chain of resulting emails that ended up with an all-caps apology from the original guy. That’ll teach him, I guess.
Fight Club
This was actually a “send to all,” not “reply to all.” Some dude wanted to start a literal underground bare-knuckle fight club in his garage, and decided to advertise it to the entire company. He didn’t last long after that, but we spotted him on the local news a short time later; he’d started his fight club.
Another club
At some point, HR sent out some material on how employees could start their own internal club (as long as it didn’t involve fighting). Some guy did a correct reply-to-sender, asking some followup questions on how to set up a club mailing list. Well, the responder must have replied-to-all against the original email (sent to everyone), because we all saw the results. The email was perfectly informative, including some possible examples for club names. One of these names was clb_HardcorePornEnthusiasts. I dunno what it says about us, but this was the only one that didn’t generate endless followup emails. We all just kinda left it there.
Kids
My favorite one. HR sent an email about Friday Movie Night, with employees and their families invited. Some guy meant to forward the message to a friend, but mis-clicked. He added the message “Hey, you want to go to movie night? Should be fun, though there’ll be kids and shit there.”
Holy christ–there was even more outrage here than the black girls one. How DARE someone even suggest that kids are anything but perfect angels to be worshiped. Anyone who says otherwise must be a child molester or something.
I swear, these people must actually hate children, and the only way they can maintain their sanity is to constantly reassure themselves that children are perfect and that any apparent deviation from this must be the fault of some adult, and furthermore surround themselves with people that also keep up the facade, and badmouth anyone that suggests otherwise. I can’t explain it any other way, at any rate.
So… what are your stories?