Funny Response to What Your Story

24 Replies

*cough* Spiceworld 2015 Vendors. Not naming names. *cough*

That was a fun couple of days.

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Bud G.

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mace

Been there... large reply-all situation. An e-mail went out to about 20-30k people on a weekend. Completely sent to the wrong group/groups. People started hitting "Reply All" (those at work and those not at work who had their phones going off). After the first 15 or 20 "Reply All" messages with "Please remove me from this list" or "This doesn't apply to me" - Corporate IT stepped informing everyone to stop using "Reply All" and the effects it was having on the system.

Then they threatened any and all people with disciplinary actions. I don't think we've had an incident since then.

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Rockn

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mace

Not a reply all, but jsut as good:

I have one about a distribution list that the receptionist sent out to the entire corporate office staff. Let us just say it was of a personal nature regarding her reproductive system issues that was supposed to be sent to her mom and sisters. I was like....AM I REALLY READING THIS....YES I AM! Poor gal was so embarrassed and sent an apology email regarding informing everyone how sorry she was for sharing her internal workings with the entire office. I just pretend like it never happened because everyone makes mistakes.

If you want to read a good one, look up my brothers boss email to the entire company.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/business/stinging-office-memo-boomerangs-chief-executive-criticize...

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Hehe... A long time ago, one of the more mature ladies in accounting had made popcorn for our small office. She did not have permission to send a mass email to all@ so she highlighted the entire global address list and sent it to everyone including the helpdesk. Unfortunately, about two thirds of our offices are located in other states. Some people were angry, some thought it was funny. Each group, angry and delighted, replied all to thank her or to freak out because they had dozens of emails regarding popcorn. I wasn't around that day, but when I came in I had hundreds of emails from users and the helpdesk.

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Not a reply all, but close.

Early on in my career I worked in IT for a silicon manufacturer. One of the (male) high school co-ops working in production wanted to go out with one of the (female) co-ops working in the admin office. No one is sure how he mistakenly added the all-employee list to his request for a date for the coming weekend, but he did... sent it to everyone, including the CEO.

I never heard if he got his date, but he got let down gently by quite a few guys telling him that they either didn't swing that way, or a few who just told him they were busy that weekend. Took him a long time to live it down.

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I friend of mine is plant manager for an international company. He was telling me the story (as his email was blowing up too), of an email sent to way more people than it was meant to. The corresponding "reply all" messages back of remove me and what is this took days to clear out. He just kept deleting emails and telling me about it.

I have always been super careful about that scary reply all button. Check the to box about a dozen times to make sure I didn't screw up before I hit send.

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Bud G.

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mace

Don't forget with the "Reply All" messages that result, you inevitably will get a few people hitting "Reply All" that then "Recall" their messages... nothing like adding more traffic.

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I like to think that there's a special section in Hell for users who abuse "Reply All" when the original email went out to EVERYONE in the company. It's even worse when others join in, and you have to fight the internal struggle of whether or not to become one of them and use "Reply All" to tell everyone not to use "Reply All".

While not technically a "Reply All", I did have one user (in management, of course) at a bank I worked at several years ago who sent out an email to all 250+ users with the cryptic message of "Chico, are you there?" I'm a bit sad that I never learned who Chico was.

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If you want to read a good one, look up my brothers boss email to the entire company.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/business/stinging-office-memo-boomerangs-chief-executive-criticize...

"$CEO . . . had two managers and his assistant read over the memo"

And none of them though it was out of line?! This guy was either a giant green rage monster that nobody wanted to cross, or had himself surrounded by bobble-headed ninnymugginses.

Quite possibly both.

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Given the Microsoft debacle where they suddenly decided without notice or explanation to change the OWA "Reply" button to "Reply All" (and then wait many months before issuing a way to change it globally via PowerShell), I'm rather surprised that we haven't seen more "Reply All" horro

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WHAT THE ACTUAL [REDACTED]?! Second time today part of a post has been lopped off between clicking "Reply" and having the post show up.

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one time we got a satellite service that had a channel for State wide training. the governing body of the state courts sent out tv, tv cart, had satellite installed and receiver too. then they sent a "security bracket" to make sure nobody could steal the receiver off the cart. literally a metal bracket with four screws to screw it to the cart. well the "installation directions" email came out. I thought the email came from my boss. So i replied back something like only a moron wouldn't be able to screw the bracket to the cart. much to my surprise i got a reply back from the governing body telling me not everybody was technically advanced and they were just covering their bases.

oops!

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Howell IT is an IT service provider.

habanero

I worked at a small company where they hired their first IT person (my boss, 3 mo before me) after they had a reply all storm that brought down the email server.

They had a company function of some kind, and someone was kind enough to zip up the 100MB of photos they took and email them to the 'All Employees' distribution group (yes, there was no size limit). Well, that wasn't so bad except that everyone else took the queue and hit reply all with all of their photos as well. The mailbox databases, which were on the C drive of the only Exchange server which was also the only file server, only domain controller, DNS, DHCP, etc (read: everything), filled up and choked the server to death. Took them 3-4 days to recover during which just about everyone got unexpected vacation and their IT consultant made his monthly quota.

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Rockn

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mace

Bryce Katz wrote:

Rockn wrote:
If you want to read a good one, look up my brothers boss email to the entire company.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/business/stinging-office-memo-boomerangs-chief-executive-criticize...

"$CEO . . . had two managers and his assistant read over the memo"
And none of them though it was out of line?! This guy was either a giant green rage monster that nobody wanted to cross, or had himself surrounded by bobble-headed ninnymugginses.

Quite possibly both.

If this is any indication of the type of person the CEO is, he would have meetings at his estate in an out building he referred to as "The Woodshed". He also tried to coerce all the members of my brothers team to throw him under the bus for doing something without the CEOs direct input that made the company millions of dollars and is still making the company money today.

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I had a coworker who was giving away an old, fat, black cat with some health issues. He sent an e-mail to the company asking if anyone would take the cat. I replied all instead of to just him, saying that if no one else would take it, I would. It all worked out: since he was a serial shelter cat, we promised him he would live out the rest of his days with us, and so far, so good.

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Bob_13

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ghost chili

We have a misleading distribution group... "CompanyName Corporate" which unlike "CompanyName CityName" doesn't go to say... the corporate office... it goes to "the company" as in all users in the company... on what... 5(?) continents... a couple dozen countries, and a plethora of cities.

Yeah that group gets used by accident from time to time.

Like the nice lady sending a message about how it was her last day in the business and she and her family were looking forward to opening their hotel... I'm sure the other Australians were interested in her offer to visit/stay at the hotel, but the rest of the world didn't really care...

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Tom2338

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tabasco

Not exactly a "reply-all" event but close. We had a guy (he is retired now thankfully) who used to send out notifications and sent them as pdf files. A couple of people told him they didn't have acrobat reader installed so he sent an e-mail to "All Users" and attached the acrobat reader installer file. Need more details? We were running Exchange 2000 and had over 10,000 users. Needless to say he crashed the mail server.

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I put in a support ticket with a software vendor. The next day I got an interesting email from said vendor...

"You F'ing Rock". (Of course not shortened)

Very shortly after I received a phone call from a very apologetic technician.

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An incident from the early days of email.

This was a very large, multi national business. The sales team supervisors in the UK were meeting at a hotel for a briefing and update on some new initiatives. One of the female team supervisors thought that it might be a nice idea for her and the other ladies to go out in the evening; what she wrote was a little bit blunter than that. Unfortunately, she hadn't just selected the other team members from the address list, but those of several other teams as well.

That was bad enough; but her sole male colleague was a bit put out at being excluded and responded with a fairly simple comment about it being a "Girl's night out". But the problem was that he then hit "Reply All".

I'm told that he was called in to see HR two days later and had to attend some "Diversity Sensitivity" training courses.

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We've never had that kind of storm here, but I did get an e-mail once from Spiceworks that didn't have everyone BCC'd in it, and some cheeky person decided to have some fun with it and choose "Reply All". It didn't last long, a few people threw in a couple of memes. I kind of wanted to join in, but decided not to.

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That's a good one. I did that to a group text during the holidays. Someone complained about it so, of course, I had to "complain" about it too....you know...just to piss him off ;)

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Jordack wrote:

I put in a support ticket with a software vendor. The next day I got an interesting email from said vendor...

"You F'ing Rock". (Of course not shortened)

Very shortly after I received a phone call from a very apologetic technician.

Why was he apologetic? Sounded like a compliment to me. Did you thank him for the nice compliment?

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BirdLaw wrote:

Jordack wrote:

I put in a support ticket with a software vendor. The next day I got an interesting email from said vendor...

"You F'ing Rock". (Of course not shortened)

Very shortly after I received a phone call from a very apologetic technician.

Why was he apologetic? Sounded like a compliment to me. Did you thank him for the nice compliment?

When he called I saw the company name on caller ID and just started laughing. The guy was so worried I would complain. I'm like; I know I rock, thanks for fixing the issue. It's all good.

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Wow, these were all incredible!!! We compiled some of our favorite responses in this blog post recap of the thread.

I think the instances of servers crashing are the biggest wake-up call that poor Reply All behavior is more than just a workplace annoyance, but sometimes an actual IT nightmare. I also can't get over that story of accidentally asking the whole office out on a date. I really hope that girl said yes to spare him the shame!! Gotta give the kid credit for going for it.

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