Reply to All

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

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?

2

An acquaintance of mine who is in communication with quite a few “major personalities” throughout the world sent his girlfriend a grovelling, pleading email. Some of the recipients responded with advice.

3

Last year we had someone at work who had sent an email out to a couple of management/supervisor distribution lists but somehow lots of employees in multiple facilities who should not have been included got a copy of the email. A couple of people replied to all saying “why did I get this email?” then others started replying to all saying “stop replying to all” and then it just snowballed from there. I think there were about fifty replies in the email chain before it finally died out.

4

I’ve seen this happen lots of times at companies where people should know better. It was bad enough that our CEO said on his on-line radio broadcast that people who respond all to these meltdowns might be first on the layoff list.

Even worse are the people who respond to all to ask to be taken off the list, when five seconds of searching can find the right way to do it.

I haven’t seen it happen for a while, but I think our email system must have rules to prevent it.

5

Pretty sure that’s against at least one of the rules of Fight Club.

6

I work for a big company that has other big companies as clients. I was working on a security incident involving us and a client. We were drafting a statement to the client. We were bouncing an email around between security, legal, and the account executive, debating what we should and shouldn’t put in the final email to the client. We finally settled on a version we we comfortable sending to the client.

So naturally, the account executive just forwarded the entire email chain to the client. Our lawyer went apoplectic. A good time was had by all.

7

There once was this really weird fat girl at another company (I’ll call her “Fea”) who said that she & her friends were going to kill me.
Oddly enough, it was picked up some 20 feet away on video by someone playing around with a cam in office and who was showing off their new camera equipment. I asked (and got) a copy of that whole exchange to an off site email address
and the person who sent it laughed & deleted it afterward.

I never took it to HR (…but I did ask not to work with her on my team). I got a job offer elsewhere pretty soon after that, which I took as the first company was making Foolish corporate moves around then.
After I jumped ship, that old company closed up shop within a few months, but I could never get myself to ever delete that old *.mov file.

I honestly hope I never see that person again, let alone get a chance to launch that torpedo her way in public domain…

8

There’s some kind of non-linear effect going on. Obviously, as the company size goes up, the more people there are to make a mistake. But I think you also end up with higher variance in the quality of those people, so the odds of these email disasters go up with perhaps the square of the company size. Furthermore, you have more people to continue any random email thread.

9

You’d think a director would have a few more brain cells than average, then you remember that they have an admin to handle most of their communications.

Senior Director 1(to all) “Director A will be taking a leave of absence until Mid may, until her return, Manager B will be handling her approval duties”

Senior Director 2(clearly not realizing she hit reply all): “Ohh my god, so which is it this time, another rehab, the crazy house again,or did she finally get caught on her expense reports and get send to jail?”

Director A never returned from her leave and was suing the last I heard(by the way it was drug rehab for those interested).
Senior Director 2 “parted” from the company over the next weekend.
Senior Director 1 had his office moved out of our building to the one way across town.

10

Back in the late nineties the large company I work for moved into a new campus which had a road and railroad tracks bisecting it. Of course people jaywalked across the street and tracks constantly, which was brought to the attention of our facilities guys, who sent out an email directing us to cross at the intersections.

Well. This became a huge email party, with some people offering alternate suggestions for us to get across to the other buildings. Bridges of various designs, tunnels, vacuum-operated tubes, etc were proposed. Other people responded with “take me off the list” and THEN the “stop replying all” people joined, and you know they always reply all themselves.

After about an hour of this foolishness, a very senior VP weighed in with a threat to 1.) Catapult (to the other side of the street) and 2. ) Terminate the next person who replied to the email thread.

Ever since that incident a group of us old-timers have used the word ‘catapulted’ as a synonym for ‘fired for cause’.

We have some tool now that manages email to large aliases, so those days are sadly gone.

11

Several years back, an all-company email was sent out (1600+ employees), warning us about a security breach that involved a theft of some sort. A girl in my department hit reply all, saying “that’s bananas!”. I don’t know why she was replying to anyone, much less sending that out to the entire company.

She’s long since moved on to a different department, but any time her name comes up, someone will pipe up with “that’s bananas!”.

12

My confession here, prior thread same subject.

13

Back in the mid 90’s I made the mistake of hitting the wrong button. A salesman had made a technical reply to a request sent on an industry-wide email group that was likely to include virtually all of our present and future customers, and I was correcting some assertions he’d made.

When I saw my reply get bounced back into my mail I was horrified. I quick told the salesman so at least he’d realize I goofed before he read the email and ripped my ass off for it (he was that kind of guy, at times). Instead he shrugged it off: it wasn’t particularly damaging, just embarrassing. (He was often that kind of guy, too.) I learned a lesson! Not that I never goofed that way again.

Frankly, there should be a header flag meaning “don’t include sender for reply-all”. I’d use that as the default whenever replying on a big email list, for anything where it wasn’t important to see the replies. (I filter all email to me specifically to a personal folder, and it’s a nuisance when that folder gets spammed with dozens of people replying to replies to replies of my reply.)

That ship has sailed, though!

Of course, everyone’s favorite reply-all is “DO NOT REPLY-ALL!”, replied to all. That fun almost never ends.

14

Yeah this happened at my office, too. I wrote about it before:

15

I’ll share a flip side story. I belong to a hiking club (mostly an online kinda thing). You sign up, they put on the email list and if somebody responds or sends something to the web/club email guru address it goes out to everybody on the list. Magic I know.

Well, on a weekly basis somebody sends out an email like “Hey all, we are going to hike the nothern trail in Red Rock Canyon State park…blah blah blah…”

And once every couple of months somebody on the mailing list will reply to ALL with “Hey Bob, sounds like a nice trip. I’m in and I’ll meet you at …blah blah blah”

It’s not the occasional accidental/clueless reply ALLS that I find funny.

It’s some people’s reaction to it.

Jeezus fucking christ. Some people act like they have been sent kiddy porn. People have “delisted” because of this (despite the fact this hiking club is about the only game in town).

I hope I never get that damn crabby.

16

That it how I usually see it. People at work who complain about 1 or even 10 reply-alls are pretty much just proving they don’t actually do anything useful. The people who do something useful get 200-1000 emails a day and are simply never going to take the 20 seconds to reply any email they really didn’t need to get.*
Clickdeleteclickdeleteclickdeleteclickdeleteclickdelete. 5 stupid emails gone in 3 seconds.

*unless it is proprietary or confidential, then it is standard practice to let them know you are getting something you shouldn’t, and ask to be removed from any further.

17

There was the time about ten years ago when some people in the company were receiving emails with infected attachments. (For example. “Please find enclosed an invoice for your recent trip” except the attachment was a virus or executable of some sort.) Someone wanted to warn people about this, so he/she forwarded the message to everyone so that people would know what it looked like. Except the sender included the infected attachment.