So I send out an email to my department earlier today because I had a customer stranded in the middle of Utah and lost his call and couldn’t get him back on the line. He was literally stranded with no way of getting home until he spoke with me or another rep. I sent the information he would need to everyone on the department distribution list, then sent a follow up a few minutes later with some additional information. he called back in, another rep transferred him to where he needed to go and all was well.
Then this dumb bitch who I’ve never met but who is on the distribution list replies to not one but both of my emails with “I think you have sent this to the wrong person.” Damn, I wish I had so little to do at my job (I’m on break right now) that I had the time to waste sending off shitty little emails slamming someone I’d never met instead of just deleting them and getting on with my little life.
I emailed her back and said “Sorry.” Twice. Now she gets to deal with four emails instead of two. Dumb fucking bitch.
I do that and I’ll tell you why. If you’ve accidentally picked my name from your address list, but meant, in fact, to send it to someone else, you may be laboring under the assumption that someone else got it when, in fact, he or she didn’t.
But it should have been obvious that everyone received the email because he sent it to a DL, not just individual people. The “To” line would have shown the DL name and not the name of each recipient. But, it does seem like a rather slight thing to get so worked up over. YMMV.
UrbanChic–I’m guessing you’re one of the few people who do this at your company, or that you’re on some pretty small mailing lists, or both. If I regularly got back an email from every single person who felt they might not have needed to see the email… holy carp.
In Outlook 2003, this is not always the case. When I send email messages using distribution lists (DLs) I’ve set up in my Contacts, the recipients see the names broken out, not the name of the list. I know this because a) I’ve seen the email messages once the arrive in others’ Inboxes and b) I’ve got some pretty, uh, let’s just say creative names for my DLs.
I am aware there are ways to set up DLs that only show the name of the list in the To field, however, I’m just pointing out that it’s not necessarily so.
I hear you. For fuck sake, the next thing you know people will be popping into Pit threads just to make some pointless criticism of the thread. That sure would suck.
As I’m on the DL, I know that the email was addressed to the DL as a whole. This was someone in a support position (not on the phones) who decided rather than just deleting the email to respond snarkily not once but twice. Since the follow up was a “reply to all” from my own copy of the original email, she had two shots at figuring out that it was a DL and not sent to her in particular.
I wouldn’t normally get worked up over something like this enough to post but this was just the thing to pluck my last goddamn nerve. It seems like every time I come in to work there’s one more little fussy picky thing that I, being new, have no way of knowing about, so I end up committing some faux pas and hearing about it. I saw her emails right after the latest 20 minute session with my boss going over like eight fussy picky things.
Once upon a time some idiot Admin created a DL called “Bedlam.” It was a DL of about 10,000 employees.
Some other idiot happened to notice this DL in his “member of” list, and send an Email to it saying “Please remove me from this DL.” (What he was doing staring at his own contact information, I can only speculate, as I’m not an idiot).
Almost as a call to arms for fellow idiots, they all started Replying All: “Me too.” “Yes, please remove me as well.” There were about 1000 of these.
Then the slightly-smarter idiots chimed in: “Do NOT Reply All!! Use the internal site “AutoDL” to remove yourself manually!” Clever, except they, too replied all. About 200 of these.
Then came the angry idiots, replying all with: “STOP USING REPLY ALL!!” These ranged into the thousands.
End result: Two huge mail servers slowing to a crawl then crashing, half the company down for two days while it all got sorted out, and a follow-up mail re-stating the policy on Reply All and a new procedure for creating AutoDLs which had to be approved before getting created.
[sub]Bonus humor involved for those who know where I work[/sub]
Once is (possibly) informative and helpful. You know, just in case. Twice in less than a minute, when it should be obvious that it’s a mass email and follow-up sent to a DL, is snarky.
If the DL is to everyone in the department that handles the same type of work (customer service of some sort I’m guessing) and Cow is part of that department, and Cow could have possibly picked up the call afterward, the you didn’t send the email to the wrong person.
OTOH, if Cow is in accounting in the basement, then purhaps the DL needs updating, but either way, Otto, I think you’re in the right. Keep everyone in the loop. I don’t want pissed off customers calling me and not knowing why. Don’t worry about conforming to office nitpick crap. It will only hurt you. If you do your job the way it’s supposed to be done instead of playing office politics, you’ll save yourself from shooting your cow-orkers.
Wait a minute, does that mean her complaints about receiving the wrong e-mail went to everyone who got the originals? She should have gotten carpet bombed with the exact same reply from everyone she sent it to.
Boy, that’s a beautiful story. Brought a tear to my eye…
But seriously, it makes me feel better because it proves that not every moron in the world works at my company!
As to the OP, that would have drove me nuts as well. It’s not that the reply was necessarily snarky - just idiotic and time-wasting. That’s sometimes way more aggravating than snarky.
Back a few years when this was a large amount, a senior secretary at my company sent out an email for the christmas office party to about a thousand people. She noticed immediately after sending that she had a spelling error, so she corrected it and resent it.
The email had graphics and sound and pretty colors and weighed in at about 4 mb.
When the mail server guys figured out who had sent 8 gb of email in 15 seconds, they went by and told her that her email privileges were going to be suspended for a while.