No, no, not during the noodle incident! As soon as the judge’s gag order is removed, I’ll apologize. I already know I went way past rude with that one.
Instead I want to ask about email ettiquette:
A friend sent me one of those political glurge emails, one I found more objectionable than most.
I sent her a response that expressed my outrage - unfortunately, it also probably made her feel about two inches tall. Not only did I send it to her, but I hit “reply all.” The address list included both people I know and people I don’t know.
What do you think?
[sub]My own thoughts are that I was rude, but no more rude than sending the message in the first place - sort of an equivalent failure of decorum, if you will.[/sub]
Yes, I think so. And probably so does everybody on the Reply All list, too.
I’ve been on the receiving end of a stupid glurge e-mail, and then the Reply All rebuttal. I found the rebuttal more rude than the glurge. Glurge is usually caused by ignorance, but that rebuttal was caused by arrogance. The person who wrote the rebuttal dropped a few points in my estimation.
My two pennies, FWIW: you win points for the Calvin and Hobbes reference, but promptly lose them for forwarding it to everybody.
I’d have to see your outraged email to judge its rudeness, but sending it to everyone is kind of the equivalent of having a shouting match with your seatmate in a crowded restaurant. It’s embarrassing for both of you and strangers don’t need to hear it.
“Reply all” is never a good idea unless it’s a generic office/group announcement (e.g. The meeting time has been changed, Please congratulate Ms. X on the birth of her third grandchild, The payroll office will close early on Friday, April 27, etc).
Possibly, someone will come along to convince me of the wonder and beauty that is “Reply All”, but I doubt it. Meh.
I’m not quite sure what you mean by a “political glurge email” – is that something she forwarded, or is it something she wrote herself trying to harrass you into supporting her party? If it’s the latter, she was probably rude to send it to you. If it’s the former, you were rude – if you get an e-mail you don’t like, just delete it, or simply ask the person who sent it not to send them to you anymore. No need to belittle people.
If it was one of those silly urban legend emails designed to scare everyone, I would say no, it isn’t rude to reply all. Those kinds of things have a bad habit of circulating.
But if it’s an opinion piece then yes, I would think it’s rude. However, I also think it’s kind of rude for someone to forward those kinds of emails to people who aren’t all on the same page politically. I sent out funny “Bushisms” during the New Year, but only to people I know are either apolitical or anti-Bush. Doing otherwise would have been just asking for trouble.
Were you rude? Maybe… and being rude is sometimes not the worst thing to do. I Replied to All on an email my sister sent out. This one in fact;
I replied to all, informing everyone that the email was an Urban Legend and told my sister the she had just deleted part of her operating system. She stopped sending me crap after that… so it worked out well.
Expressing outrage with a reply-all seems rude to me, IMHO. A non-confrontational disagreement would be OK, but a dressing-down should have been sent just to the originator, not to all. IMHO, of course.
Yes, I’m afraid you were rude. “Reply all” ought not to be used in that situation. As sins go, though, it’s a minor one. An apology would probably be a good idea.
Unless the e-mail was incredibly offensive, I really don’t think it matters whether or not she was rude to send it to the OP. I think that it would have been rude for the OP to hit “Reply All” regardless of whether this person typed it herself or just forwarded something on.
However, it sounds like the OP made a geniune mistake and wasn’t trying to be rude (unless I read this wrong). If that’s accurate (is it?), it was a really big mistake and the friend might well be pissed for quite a while - understandably so - but everyone screws up sometime.
Reply All is a scary function of e-mail, one I try not to use too often or I inevitably wind up with smelly-feet breath.
Like Who_Me, the only time I use the “reply all” is when I’m gently de-bunking with Snopes. When people send me stupid glurge that isn’t even worth de-bunking, I just delete it. On occasion, when people go to far, I’ll respond just to them, not to everyone. Let them do their own outraged responding.
Oh, I completely took it for granted that the OP had hit “Reply All” by mistake, though when I read over his post again, there’s no indication of that. So if he did indeed hit “Reply All” in this case on purpose, that was definitely uncalled for.
Rude? Yeah. Effective? Probably. If I’ve told somebody to stop sending me mass emailed crap, and they refuse over and over to take me off their list, I will resort to the “Reply All” nuclear option. That gets me off their list. (I’ve only resorted to this once or twice.)
Pfft… you think THAT’s bad, a series of events happened to coincide that caused me to purposely send an uber-snarky email to my MOTHER and one of her clients:
I was in process of transitioning onto another medication, so I was temporarily “off my meds;”
I have been telling said mother for years to not send me dumb-ass glurge of either the religious or political kind (this particular glurge hit on both);
I live in Alabama, so the glurge was something I was unfortunately intimately familiar with;
I had had a VERY bad day at work.
So when I received the email about how poor, put-upon Roy Moore was in the battle of his life to keep from being disbarred, and how we should all support him in his attempts to bring religion back into the family (and everywhere else, apparently), and on, and on, and on, culminating in a stupid as fuck poem, I completely lost it.
Mom didn’t talk to me for weeks. My Buddhist, liberal, environmental lawyer sister loved it, though.
I don’t know if you were rude or not, but I’ve long been considering writing a nice email asking not to be on email distribution lists for religious or political matters and sending it to my family and friends. Many of them don’t realize that I don’t have their same political or religious beliefs (and would be VERY surprised by this, as I don’t often discuss politics or religion with ANYONE, including and maybe especially family.) I haven’t done it yet, but one day…
