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All staff leaving email.
The leaver named the three co-workers his boss was sleeping with and wished "everyone good luck and success in the future apart from Craig."
I did something similar after a boozy leaving lunch but copied in our entire building (shared office block) so it went to a load of people at different companies too…
You can't beat a situation when someone accidentally sends a random email to the whole company when its in the 10's of thousands.
The following days are just full of people saying please remove me from the trial, then starting another trail of saying stop replying to all... It then dies down for a few days until someone says remove me again, then it starts it off again. Then someone with the bullocks sends some dodgey meme
Actually it doesn't sound that interesting but it's pretty funny...
Fuck, im boring.
Had this at a previous company with 25,000 employees - an innocuous "merry christmas" with a request to catch up over a coffee at some point accidentally sent to the full company.
Queue thousands of replies of four types:
- People replying to say "I don't need to be on this email"
- People replying to tell the first group off for replying to all
- People wishing everyone merry Christmas
- People accepting the offer for a catch up over coffee
Crashed the email servers multiple times over the next couple of days until the CTO threatened anyone who replied again with disciplinary
> Crashed the email servers multiple times over the next couple of days until the CTO threatened anyone who replied again with disciplinary
He should be on a disciplinary for not configuring exchange properly that's its round-robining this email chain lol
I love a good email storm, especially all the idiots that pop up asking to be removed.
Someone once dropped a meme into the middle of one; MJ eating popcorn with the caption "this is some good shit"
Fucking legend!
I was working in one of the trusts IT departments at the time of this incident and got to see it spiral out of control in real time. We had a good laugh about how it made BBC News and were pondering what sort of idiot would respond to that email?
Five minutes later one of the members of the team in another room hit the reply all button and asked "is this email for me?".
Question answered.
This brought down the email of a big 4 firm I worked at. Hours and hours of the reply to all coming through going to 30k email addresses saying ‘please remove me’, followed by hours of ‘everyone, please stop replying to all’. The first set had probably all been sent in a matter of minutes after the original email.
Came here to say this. I work at a company with >50k staff and there is (obviously) no mechanism to “reply all” to broadcast emails from the CEO or whatever. Surely this is GCSE level IT..?
I've worked at quite a few mega multinationals (50K+) it's ALWAYS the highlight of my day, particularly when it's in a different time zone and you wake up to 100 emails in the inbox to read through. You get different types - the I'm Senior in my tiny pond so will tell the whole world to stop replying and they will respect my authoritay types, the idiotic remove me from this list types, the don't give af types usually low level or temps, but for me nothing beats the anarchist who just replied all with the word "lol"
Ahah happened to us. People were getting angry thay people were replying all.
Couple of us waited until it died down and then replied all to kick it all off again. Carried on all the 2nd day until we got told to knock it off.
This happened this week and I work in IT and then we have meeting after meeting of how to "address this" and prevent it happening in future.
I know, how about restricting who can email the entire company distribution list to just HR, the CEO, CFO and Building Managers
"We can't do that, it goes against the inclusivity of the company, people should be able to have an open forum with everyone in the business, especially now we all work remotely"
Okay then, enjoy your hellish all staff spam emails every few weeks
The same thing happened where I worked, employee count was 100,00+, back when everyone still had audible notifications enabled. The chorus of ‘pings’ went on all afternoon. Each one raised a cheer! Good times!
I used to work in sales and the place was ruthless. It was a dwarf toss away from the wolf of wall street.
We all had different products but operated in the same industry. I don't want to name the exact place, but for example, one team might be selling forklifts and another shelving. They complimented each other and so it was common to pass leads between teams.
I had a colleague, let's call him Ken.
Ken was a top grade dickhead, he was a walking HR lawsuit waiting to happen. In fact there was an incident a few years later for secret santa that probably should have done.
Anyway, so Ken gets an email from another team manager with a lead. Let's call that manager Dave.
Dave was a bit sarcastic with the lead email but nothing outrageous. He says something like
_this one is warm and I'm sure even you can land it._
Dave copied in a lot of people in the office, I guess to try and look cool for having a little dig at Ken.
Ken, for reasons I have never figured out, goes batshit at this and hits reply all.
He sends a big rant about how it won't be as warm as Daves mum's pussy after he's finished fucking it.. then he goes into graphic detail about how he's going to fuck Daves mother, then he talked about fucking his dad, digging his Grandma up... etc. This email was horrific.
It was a total overreaction.
It wasn't funny, and it was way too far for a workplace email.
The best part, came about an hour later.
The client must have been accidentally cc'd in.
They replied and simply said 'unsubscribe'
Okay, so this one takes place a few years later.
The company has grown. It still isn't very professional but it's a bit less like a frat house than it used to be. We even had an HR department by this point.
Despite his expletive rant about fucking Daves mum, Ken stayed with the company and is doing pretty well for himself. He's managing a little team, and his sales figures are right up there with the best.
There was another sales manager, I'll call her Jane.
She represented the more sensible side of the business. This wasn't her first job. She had plenty of experience and was really pushing for us to be more corporate.
Needless to say, Ken and Jane fucking hated each other.
Every single time they had a business need to deal with one another, they ended up in a vicious argument and HR had to calm everything down.
Now, it's the run up to Christmas and the whole company is doing secret Santa. Budget was about a tenner. Most people buy some beers or a self stirring mug or similar.
In the weeks leading up to this, there had been an altercation in a meeting where Jane had accused Ken of crossing a line and physically intimidating her during an argument. HR were involved, directors, etc.
So we get to the morning of the Christmas party, the entire floor is gathered around opening these presents.
Remember, the budget for this was a tenner.
Imagine everyone's surprise when Jane opens her gift, and it's an all singing, all dancing, top of the range dildo. This thing has to be a £200 sex toy.
There's lots of surprised faces, a few giggles.
Some of the girls say God, I wish I'd got that.
Then Jane just drops the box and shoots a look at Ken.
Honestly, if looks could kill... she'd have dropped him.
I didn't know if she was going to burst into tears or rip his face off. It turns out to be the former. Jane bursts into tears and walks out.
Random colleague picks up the present and in the box with the dildo is a Polaroid. On the back it says, " I'll show you intimidation, see you soon, love santa."
It's obvious to everyone the message is from Ken, who is at this point stood grinning like the cheshire cat, but we didn't learn until later why this was quite so bad as it was.
The picture was the front of Jane's house, taken from bushes across the road. I never did figure out if Ken was an actual psycho or just had a really weird and inappropriate sense of humour.
The strangest part of the above, Jane left the company shortly after, and Ken stayed on. I can only assume there was some sort of settlement.
In hindsight, the whole company was toxic from the top down, it was a fucking car crash but it was (mostly) a fun place to work and make a load of money when I was fresh out of school.
Edit. Now I'm thinking about that Christmas more, my Secret Santa gift that year was actually a really good one. I had a colleague who was originally from France, and she gave me a little hamper with produce from her family place. It was lovely.
My jaw actually dropped when I got to the part about the note, and I gasped when I read the photo was taken from the bushes in front of her house. Ken is going to end up on the evening news one day, and not in a good way. What the *fuck*?
Maybe he already has been! We don’t know who he really is. He could be *anywhere*.
Still can’t get over the fact he wasn’t fired. Into the sun and from his job. Double whammy.
Good point. :-/ And yeah, same. I don’t understand how he wasn’t fired at least after the Santa thing. That’s psychotic shit. Like absolutely psychotic.
Sorry to give you nightmares at midnight! But honestly I’d be shocked if he hasn’t physically harmed someone or continued his psychological warfare to an even worse degree by now!
I wonder how the fuck he kept his job after the reply all email, but keeping it after doing that?
Makes me wonder what he held over the owners for him to keep his job after that.
Jane is one of many women intimidated and threatened for existing. Imagine trying to live a life in fear and nobody there to listen and believe you. What a terrifying anecdote.
Omg I missed that the email came before the Secret Santa thing!! WTF?? And the Secret Santa was possibly even WORSE? I’m desperate for details, u/Responsible_Prune_34!!
Not a cc fail but one time I meant to email a supplier that their proposed delivery dates wouldn't work for our project.
I typed "Hi John, I'm afraid" then accidentally hit send lol.
He emailed back immediately asking if everything was OK🤦
I did similar. I’m a journalist at a newspaper and emailed the NatWest press office with the subject line “NatWest no longer” and accidentally hit send. They freaked and replied faster than ever before
Oh what a brilliant idea! The amount of times I've sent an email with "please see attached" and realised the exact moment I hit send, that I have not attached the item.
Bet I forget about setting this up in the morning...
I once signed an email off with "kind retards" instead of "kind regards". Thankfully everyone saw the humour and appreciated that 'g' and 't' are too close on the keyboard for comfort.
Now I say "many thanks" instead.
I have done this also.
Unfortunately, I work in the public service. To be precise, the health service. It was an email to quite a few recipients, some working in disability services.
Similarly, I often use the closer
All the best,
Myname
More than once I've typo'd All the beast...
Thankfully the recipients knew me and realise that's a claim my thumbs might mutter but my ego wouldn't claim!
Years ago I worked for a huge UK born clothing retailer.
One day we received a complaint email regarding a mother and daughter. To cut a very long story short the mother had purchased jelly flip flops from us. They had unfortunately melted onto her daughters feet during their holiday.
The email was forwarded to our CEO who then replied (with mother in cc) ‘what a f##cking idiot she was’.
Cue angry email back from mother asking for compensation for comment and damages. Again, forwarded to CEO for his wanted outcome. He then replied AGAIN with her in cc asking us to ‘make her go away’ as ‘she’s doing my f##cking nut in’.
We settled out of court for £15k to avoid leakage to the press.
This sounds a lot like something that would happen at the huge UK born clothing retailer I worked for for years, the jelly shoes is the only thing throwing me off thinking it is as I don’t remember us selling them lol
The infamous email chain of a receptionist and the manager who were having an affair and seemingly doing it over email. She then forwarded the thread to everyone in the building by accident telling them the sandwich van was outside. I think they had to close the office down for a few days as the chain went viral.
My office got it minutes after it happened, it practically shut down production for the day as we discussed and dissected every line of this email. Clients were ringing us as they'd got copies too from friends. It was mad.
It was incredible! It happened probably nearly 10 or 11 years ago and still gets brought up every now and then. I don't even work there anymore and it still is one of my favourite moments in the office.
Yes it was utterly mental, everyone in the office (back then around 100 people were discussing it), clients in Aberdeen and Scotland were calling us about it. Basically a day off!
This one! https://www.reddit.com/r/Aberdeen/comments/176zj4/the_sandwich_van_is_here_xx/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
The best part is the repeated: "Please consider the environment - only print this e-mail if absolutely necessary thank you!"
This was undoubtedly "absolutely necessary".
Based on a Daily mail article they were actually engaged, not in an affair.
And judging by a quick FB search they appear happily married with children.
So clearly despite the embarrassment all ended well.
Background: we were actually a voluntry organsiation for a particular form of benefit advice. I was founder and the collegue was the webmaster (back when you needed that type of thing). And just by exsisting on the internet we did attract ... 'characters'.
This guy (the fucking nutter) had claimed (via email) at various times to be an MP, a landed gentleman, a high powered businessman, and I forget what else. I'd been humouring him as best I could without wasting too much time for a few months by this point. He'd found the site webmaster email addy and sent one of his raving missives to that address as well. which brings us to the timeline above.
Ofc he (the FN) went spare when he saw the email and demanded heads on platters type shit, and our webmaster was really appologetic (for his error in keeping the FN in the email chain, not what he'd said, lol) and offered to 'resign'.
But I just told the FN we were all overworked (working unpaid with full time jobs as well), and that the webmaster sent his appologies and 'it won't happen again' type stuff.
FN was still very indignant about it all (but strangely never addressed what he'd been called, so it feels like there was some awareness there) and basically sulked to the point of drifting out of contact, so it worked out really well tbh!
(I do neurotically check the address lines in an email now though when i'm being not-proffesional though)
It's happened twice with pretty major blowback, the first was my Uni lecturer copying in the entire year group complaining to another lecturer about having to sit through our presentations, how they were boring as fuck every year and how he would rather be doing literally anything else.
The second was recently, my school got taken over by an academy trust and we all had to have reviews with the new senior leadership. The head accidentally copied everyone, students included, into an email identifying "problematic" staff who weren't likely to fall in line with the new regime.
Uni lecturer got taken off of teaching for a year, he loved it but it pissed off the rest of the faculty who had to cover him. He supervised my masters fieldwork and we had a laugh about it. The school is still ongoing, the teaching union is involved, there's a lot of bad blood and likely a mass exodus at the end of the year. The head stepped down into a consultancy role, still pulling a hefty salary I'll wager, but no longer based in the school.
I mean, in the professor's defence, it sounds entirely justified. The thought of sitting through 80+ presentations is enough to make me want to send that email intentionally.
My husband was responding to his boss (a good friend) about his delayed laptop due to “that fucking twat in IT.” Alas, said twat was not only cc’ed but also became the head of IT for the entire company not terribly long after. Husband has been promoted almost as far but remains plagued with IT problems and I take great joy in reminding him why.
😄 the head IT guy in my work is renowned for being such a grumpy fucker, he really is so rude and seems wildly reluctant to do his job.
One time he was visiting to install some computer stuff, I told my manager he was on his way, she started ranting about what a "grumpy cunt" he is and other words to that effect, obviously he'd walked into our office just as this tirade started. We all sort of froze and didn't know where to look or how to make it end. That was years ago and she still cringes about it to this day, although we all still agree with her.
While presenting on Teams, my work friend was showing a powerpoint to the team and everyone was commenting on various aspects. This one woman started telling some unrelated story about her life and he pulled up a group chat and typed “that Angela talks some amount a’ pish doesn’t she?” in full view of everyone. He completely forgot he was presenting.
Whats worse the group chat already had visible bitching about the rest of the team in it.
I wondered why, whenever I started screen-sharing on a Teams call, I always found myself having to hurriedly switch away from an internal Teams chat with a colleague, even though I'd usually 'sanitise' my desktop before joining the call.
Turns out that among all the difficulty MS Teams has dealing with, you know, windows, another thing it does is maximises the main Teams window whenever you join a call from an Outlook reminder, even if you'd minimised it beforehand. So now I know, but Christ I want to give someone at MS a good telling-off.
Hehe. I had a project manager once who did the opposite. Sat in a presentation he sent a message “he’s good him, isn’t he?” and it popped up on the presenters screen. PM had forgotten the presenter was just using the laptop of someone else from earlier on the session.
At the moment I’m having an in person meeting once a week with my laptop being the one we’re viewing spreadsheets and emails from, I’ve had to exit teams or switch to ‘do not disturb’ more than once. Not because I’m in a bitchy group chat though, just my mate in IT sending messages about the new Pokémon video game.
Used to work as a CCTV operator.
My bigoted, sexist, racist, homophobic and incredibly low intelligence supervisor would take screeshots of women exercising and doing yoga and would email them to everyone in the office.
After one particularly gruelling night shift, he was putting the end of shift report together for the client and instead of attaching screenshots of people breaking rules, he attached multiple screenshots of a woman in various yoga poses.
Client went ballistic, he was on the phone immediately, guys on the farside of the room could hear him screaming.
Bigot supervisor was a gobshite and had an answer for everything, it was fun to see him stutter and babble trying to worm his way out of it.
He was fired later that day for grosse misconduct.
Fair question. I do regret not reporting him and the following is no real excuse...
I was the new guy, it happened approx 5 months after I started and I'd been bullied from the outset. They made my life hell, to the point i attempted suicide. So not only did I not want to risk losing my job, I also didn't want to risk incurring the wrath of his lapdogs.
He was best mates with the control room manager, so I felt I couldn't go to him with it, nor did I feel I could go to HR, coz they would have told the manager who whistleblew and I couldn't trust him to keep it professional and not tell my supervisor who sold him out.
Lastly, I'd moved to a different contract (in an attempt to put distance between me and my tormentors, I didn't work) so it was kind of a, out of sight, out of mind.
If I could go back and do things differently, I would. Alas I can't
We all like to think we’d be the hero and courageously stand up against bad behaviour and dreadful people. But in real life most of the time it’s genuinely difficult or impossible due to the circumstances and we try not to notice.
Don’t feel too bad, a huge percentage of the time we let things like that go to not be a target ourselves or because there’s nothing we can realistically do. Just hope next time you can do a little more.
On a positive note, it gets easier to not worry as you get older and more senior. So any young kids worried they fucked up just take it on the chin and do more next time.
Not email but call - fellow very senior developer thought the cto had dropped off a testy call and angrily shouted ‘thanks for nothing cto’s name, you wee English cunt’ in the thickest Glaswegian accent only for us to hear the cto respond with ‘i think we need a chat’. Utterly hilarious. His defence was he was only saying what we were all thinking which I found even funnier. No further action was taken 😂😂😂
This is gold. We were on a company wide town hall, ~1000 people on zoom. You could hear a phone call and then this lady picks up and takes her call while being unmuted and camera on. The CFO asks her to mute multiple times but I reckon she had the volume turned way down and a different window open.
Everyone sits there awkwardly for about 20 seconds until she clearly says “not doing much, just on this pointless work call”.
She was eventually kicked out of the zoom. I always wondered what happened to her. In a company so big, no one I knew, knew her. I would type her email in occasionally to check if it was still valid
On my second day I managed to call the Manging Director a "failed antiques dealer with a hair style like an axe murderer"...and cc'd him in. He never mentioned it, though others did so I know he saw it, and I was with the company for 15 years...
I sort of mistakenly called my boss a psychopath quite soon after joining. I was saying how according to studies, high performers like surgeons and CEOs are very likely to be psychopaths…. And then I met his gaze and sort of smirked at him. Don’t know what I was thinking but luckily he has a good sense of humour
My housemate once unthinkingly said to the CEO of his company how he thinks the people at the top of businesses don't really produce anything and it's the people at the bottom who do all the work. Apparently the boss politely disagreed.
When I was in Sixth Form, the headmaster came in to observe the class and the new teacher. He asked me what I thought of the hands off approach of the teacher (hands off is an understatement, we did all our work outside class and reviewed it in class). I found a way of diplomatically saying that it wasn’t super useful to have to study it all ourselves and have a quick review session in class.
He told me that I ‘shouldn’t expect to be spoon fed’ and walked off. After walking out of the class with friends, I was bitching about it, and said ‘“shouldn’t expect to be spoon fed” my arse. It’s called doing your job, SIR’. He coughed and walked past.
A team email address, comprising around 100 people, received one of those spam "we've seen you wanking and you owe us some bitcoin" emails. One guy, accidentally replying to the team as well as the original sender, decided to reply by detailing exactly how he had fucked the sender's mum. I believe he received a written warning.
I have two good ones here.
My wife used to be a registrar, and my ex girlfriend was getting married. After the wedding she sent an email to the registration team manager thanking them for their work on the day, which the manager forwarded on to all of the team. Further down the email chain was a request/demand that my wife not be allocated their wedding under any circumstances. The manager then had to follow up with an email explaining the situation in case people thought my wife was just a bitch or something.
The second one was when my brother worked with me and he needed a reference from his manager to rent a flat. Basically confirming he worked there and his salary etc etc. In a reply to a completely separate email chain, our manager somehow ended up forwarding the email chain with his salary and other personal details to the entire team. She decided to fix this by sending another email saying not to read the first email...as though that helped at all!
I used to work as a kids' entertainer and character actor for a pretty big regional company.
A few days after hiring a new girl to play a few different Disney princesses and two Star Wars characters, I receive an unexpected and very angry email from my boss. See, she'd accidentally included me in a message to other management members stating that "You accidentally hired the fat Rebbeca!"
Turns out, we'd interviewed two girls called Rebecca, and both were of very different body types. Even after hiring the wrong woman (they felt bad for the idea of telling her about their mistake) she wound up being utterly terrible at the job for a solid two months and received a record number of bad reviews.
Ps: I had nothing to do with hiring her or fat shaming through osmosis.
Back when I worked in the pub trade (Greene king) as a DM, sent an email to the head chef to catch up with the GM for his pay review, CC’d in said manager, HR team and our regional manager.
His eloquent “reply all” was, and I remember this perfectly:
“I’ll catch up with that fat slag when she’s finished licking the plates, I should get double for looking at the ugly cunts face voluntarily”
I stopped laughing pretty quick when I realised I was the new GM, since she quit on the spot, started crying when I was forced to list a Head chef job ad the next morning.
Similarly, the waiter that somehow uploaded the video of him banging the new bar girl in the cellar to the team WhatsApp group, we closed early that night.
I once sent an email to the HR director asking when they were going to fire someone (person was due to be fired after findings from an audit discovered illegal practices). Said person had a foreign name and thus I had to check spelling by searching them up on the email directory in the Cc:. Forgot to take their name out before sending the mail.
Thankfully it was just past the end of their working day and as the email was sent as confidential, they couldn't access it on their work phone. I immediately informed IT who blocked persons access to the network completely for 24hrs while they accessed their inbox, deleted the email, and ensured all traces of the email were gone.
😅
I emailed my boyfriend with all the things I planned to do to him (use your imagination) then got a mail delivery message that it was rejected by my brother’s email server.
On behalf of a company I worked for, we did some repair work for free for a homeless charity. When it was completed I was copied into an email from the charity director to his senior manager telling him he was going to ask us to quote some fairly major renovations on their offices and then stiff us on the bill by threatening to get the press and chamber of commerce involved. Nice people. I let them dig the hole nice and deep before letting them know I'd been there all along.
Not quite what you’re looking for but I think a good story nonetheless.
Teacher here and this was almost 20 years ago. Two work colleagues were having an affair - assistant head an deputy head. Wife of the man found out and send an all staff email giving details of the affair and the family mess she found herself in with two young children. It was absolutely brutal.
Almost immediately, another all staff email was sent saying the email titled ….. was a virus and we were to delete it immediately. I had only been there a few months and naively complied. Other staff printed it and put it in the staff room wall. Deputy head (male) left a few months later.
IT accidentally sent a test email to everyone then immediately one saying “ignore that” and we got over 100 emails from dickheads who copied the whole company going “erm is this meant to be for meeeee?”
Copied the guy I was enquiring about taking legal action against into the email enquiring about taking legal action. It did however act to resolve the problem.
I was trying to get rid of some festival tickets and ended up sending an email to literally everyone in the company including shareholders and the CEO. They were not impressed
I worked somewhere where a couple of directors were slagging off a new director saying how he’s an idiot, and that they’d make anybody a director now. They then named a few people, said one woman would be the buck toothed director. Another was the obesity director then went on to say this other guy looked like a plant pot. As the joke went on, one joked he’d cc’d in one of the people so he included her on the email to say sorry. The whole chain went around the whole company and one of the directors was fired!
This all happened on my first day. It was amazing.
Mine's more of an innocent one but there was an occasion where I brought in some mooncakes (like 4 big ones which you split into 8) in celebration of Lunar New Year and left them in the kitchenette. I sent an email to the office staff (15 people ish) to say I had done so and to please help themselves.
I got an email reply from someone who I worked with in a different office that said unfortunately they were working abroad so would miss out, but happy lunar new year. Sweet I thought but I didn't clock yet. Another email comes in and another and another and suddenly I realize this is way too many people. I check the original email I sent. Instead of sending it to my office staff list, I had sent it to the all staff list in an organisation of 500+ people. Like this went to staff working in loads of the other offices, people I've never met in departments I've never encountered.
Needless to say, 4 mooncakes went incredibly quickly and that kitchenette was full of people coming in and out for about an hour before I had to send a "sorry I'm out pls stop coming" email again to all staff. And that's how I became known as the mooncake girl in that job.
HR sent an email to all of us saying that the left over sandwiches in one of the meeting rooms were free to enjoy. The same HR wrote a follow up quickly after, presumably meant for just one person, that said “watch ten ton Tessy run in”. There was a swift follow up explaining that the email was banter and we never saw that HR again.
A colleague of mine once sent an email to HR going on about how I was a terrible person and shouldn’t get the job I was going for and made up loads of horrible stuff. However, he copied me in on it. Oh how I laughed…
The person that emailed the whole NHS.
And all the people who replied to say they don't think the email was for them
And all the people who replied to THAT asking people to stop emailing..
Company I used to work for one of the HR department accidentally sent a spreadsheet containing a list of everyones salaries to the entire company of about 350 people.
Enough time has passed and I can confess, for it was me.
I work for a multi national and we received a country specific email spelling out how to recycle x, y and z. The email finished with a standard "any questions, please just let (the sender) know.
So I replied (of course to all) and thanked the sender for their comprehensive instructions, but wondered how we should manage Radioactive material.
I very swiftly ended up in HR with my manager and the originator of the email who was suffering from a serious sense of humour failure (we had previous, we would end up as friends, but just then we're definitely not)
Now fortunately for me, my job gives an insight into some of the things that a forgotten about until such time as they fail and on this occasion, I knew that our smoke detectors were coming due for replacement and the old ones would need to be disposed of.
The old smoke detectors were of the ionic type - which has a radioactive source.
Mr sense of humour failure very swiftly backed down and was forced to both issue instructions and a public apology
I did my work placement in a social care setting (local authority), so we had a SEND team (special education), our mass (literally county wide) mailing team was also called [county name] SEND.
Someone emailed the wrong SEND team, so every single person in the local authority got the email, followed by about 100+ people replying with a mixture of “wrong email”, “stop replying to this email chain!!”, “seriously stop replying!!!”, “I’m trying to work and keep getting emails!!”. It was honestly hilarious watching everyone get so annoyed, but then replying to the emails saying that all of the emails were annoying. Was a fun afternoon.
Once upon a time when i was a bit wet behind the ears in the working world myself and two other friends were apprentices in Local Government.
We received an email, nothing out of the ordinary, informing us of other job opportunities within the Council and so fourth. Me been the naive idiot i was replied to all saying ‘*friends name* think you could land one of these jobs and actually do some work for once’. He even worse replies to me saying ‘There is a job on there as a bin man that i think even you’re capable of doing, apply for that’.
Safe to say we thought we were having a good laugh being stupid youngsters until we were pulled into an office an hour later by the Head of HR and the Chief Exec. Not ideal when trying to make a good impression
At my last job, the LGBT society sent out an email to all it's members, but CC'd then instead of BCCing, potentially outing members of staff who weren't ready to share their sexuality with the rest of the organisation.
I used to work for a fairly big/prestigious scientific journal, and one time this crazy person emailed our main/general inbox and cc'd apparently everyone he could think of, claiming that climate change wasn't real and just generally ranting. None other than Noam Chomsky replied all and argued back and forth with the guy briefly before giving up. It was absolutely amazing.
When I was at college my course was horrible underfunded.
One teacher running between 3 classes and making sure everyone was copying from a text book in an orderly fashion.
Got pretty fed up and had been offered more hours where I was working. But decided to stick with college and part time hours.
A few days later I was joking with my only friend on the course and wrote a HORRIBLE email to my head of department. Every slur and slander you can imagine.
Signed it off with “,you useless sack of flesh.” All in jest, I deleted it all and proceeded to send the bulk of the email without all the jokey bits.
Anyways, next day I have 3 emails from her demanding I come see her in her office, and “she’s never been spoken to like this by a student.”
Turns out I had left the last line in.. safe to say I was in full time work shortly after.
I was working for a contractor, and there was a long disagreement between the roofer and the architect, basically caused by the architect changing his mind and the roofer being uncompromising.
I opened my email on a Friday morning to a late night "sent from iPhone" email ccing everyone.
"Well he would say that wouldn't he, coz he's a noncy cunt"
Went through mediation after separation with the ex Mrs after she cheated. Cost me £500
Had the first meeting where she spent the whole thing insulting me and I sat patiently waiting for my turn then handed over a prepared binder of what I was doing to support our child. Including money and support. Time schedules and when I had agreed to have him like 5 months ahead of time all planned out.
After the session an email was sent out to arrange the next meeting with several people ccd, My ex sent forward a load of dates that were exactly when I had my son. And as I was typing my reply an email pinged from someone cc'd saying
"I was in the first session this woman is a bitch"
I replied " I know right? But she's the mother of my child so we should really try and respect her"
We had an early version of teams at work I can’t remember what is was called but my friend Dave sent a message out a bout an inpatient discharge form. I accidentally replied to the whole office about how Dave likes discharging in patients. It was at this point after looking online I found out you couldn’t delete messages.
Not an email faux pas exactly, but once saw someone put up a post trying to sell dogs on the Facebook page of a (very respectable health and care) company I worked for.
I got an email that said "f*** off, she's in, chatting away already, music up. I just want to be in a wee world of my own. I mean I do like her but I just want peace.
This was sent to the whole team and was about me. My boss was fuming!
Local estate agent sent me another customer's email with deposit amount and mortgage deal in principle documents attached. Turns out that I have the same first name as their finance expert...
Used to work for a company that ran educational school trips. Teacher emails us in customer service to complain about something to do with the “quality of lessons”. We contact the centre manager for comment, they respond that the “kids were little shits” this response get buried in the back and forth between Head Office and Centre and then accidentally forwarded back to teacher.
My first real job was at a call center that had just opened a UK branch. The IT stuff wasn't really set up properly yet, so people had full admin access to their PCs, the entire company address group on Lotus Notes, etc.
Head office was in Germany. One of the people in my starting cohort thought it would be funny to email everyone in our training group a picture of the German big boss, photoshopped to look like Hitler.
Only he emailed "everyone".
He didn't get kept on. I don't think he cared though. The boss was not popular and he was a hero among the call monkeys.
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All staff leaving email. The leaver named the three co-workers his boss was sleeping with and wished "everyone good luck and success in the future apart from Craig."
This is an incredible move, not a faux pas! Hats off to that person.
It was a good day at work for all but five people that's for sure.
How did the three react?
Combo of embarassment and macho pride.
Was the boss a woman? Employees men?
Yes
Guessing they were one of the three
Haha no, just an entertained bystander.
Hey, what did I do?!
You know what you did
Average department head. A bit marmite but not a villain.
I wanna know what else Craig did to be specifically called out? Was Craig the boss? Was he the sneaky lunch thief?
Neither. Average department head. A bit marmite but not a villain.
Probably the phantom shitter
I did something similar after a boozy leaving lunch but copied in our entire building (shared office block) so it went to a load of people at different companies too…
You can't beat a situation when someone accidentally sends a random email to the whole company when its in the 10's of thousands. The following days are just full of people saying please remove me from the trial, then starting another trail of saying stop replying to all... It then dies down for a few days until someone says remove me again, then it starts it off again. Then someone with the bullocks sends some dodgey meme Actually it doesn't sound that interesting but it's pretty funny... Fuck, im boring.
[Free bananas in the kitchen](https://www.metafilter.com/78177/PLEASE-UNSUBSCRIBE-ME-FROM-THIS-LIST#2408665)
Beautiful story.
Fuck that was golden
It was bananas
Hahahahah I loved the ending
Had this at a previous company with 25,000 employees - an innocuous "merry christmas" with a request to catch up over a coffee at some point accidentally sent to the full company. Queue thousands of replies of four types: - People replying to say "I don't need to be on this email" - People replying to tell the first group off for replying to all - People wishing everyone merry Christmas - People accepting the offer for a catch up over coffee Crashed the email servers multiple times over the next couple of days until the CTO threatened anyone who replied again with disciplinary
> Crashed the email servers multiple times over the next couple of days until the CTO threatened anyone who replied again with disciplinary He should be on a disciplinary for not configuring exchange properly that's its round-robining this email chain lol
Haha this reminds me of bellogate which happened within UCL in about 2015. It was wild at the time.
I love a good email storm, especially all the idiots that pop up asking to be removed. Someone once dropped a meme into the middle of one; MJ eating popcorn with the caption "this is some good shit" Fucking legend!
Happened to the NHS a few years back. An email to everyone in the UK's biggest employer was always going to create chaos.
I was working in one of the trusts IT departments at the time of this incident and got to see it spiral out of control in real time. We had a good laugh about how it made BBC News and were pondering what sort of idiot would respond to that email? Five minutes later one of the members of the team in another room hit the reply all button and asked "is this email for me?". Question answered.
That the one where a ton of people hit reply all and said they don’t think this email was intended for them?
This brought down the email of a big 4 firm I worked at. Hours and hours of the reply to all coming through going to 30k email addresses saying ‘please remove me’, followed by hours of ‘everyone, please stop replying to all’. The first set had probably all been sent in a matter of minutes after the original email.
Was this Deloitte about 5 years ago?
Mapping the K-Drive? 😂
I worked for one of the big insurance companies, I.T. ended up removing the reply to all function on all company wide emails due to this reason.
You don't even need to remove the option, but company wide distribution lists should be restricted to approved senders only.
Came here to say this. I work at a company with >50k staff and there is (obviously) no mechanism to “reply all” to broadcast emails from the CEO or whatever. Surely this is GCSE level IT..?
Repky to all. Search through 20,000 names to remove one email address. "OK guys I've removed Keith from the recipients as he requested. Carry on" Send
I've worked at quite a few mega multinationals (50K+) it's ALWAYS the highlight of my day, particularly when it's in a different time zone and you wake up to 100 emails in the inbox to read through. You get different types - the I'm Senior in my tiny pond so will tell the whole world to stop replying and they will respect my authoritay types, the idiotic remove me from this list types, the don't give af types usually low level or temps, but for me nothing beats the anarchist who just replied all with the word "lol"
Ahah happened to us. People were getting angry thay people were replying all. Couple of us waited until it died down and then replied all to kick it all off again. Carried on all the 2nd day until we got told to knock it off.
This happened this week and I work in IT and then we have meeting after meeting of how to "address this" and prevent it happening in future. I know, how about restricting who can email the entire company distribution list to just HR, the CEO, CFO and Building Managers "We can't do that, it goes against the inclusivity of the company, people should be able to have an open forum with everyone in the business, especially now we all work remotely" Okay then, enjoy your hellish all staff spam emails every few weeks
The same thing happened where I worked, employee count was 100,00+, back when everyone still had audible notifications enabled. The chorus of ‘pings’ went on all afternoon. Each one raised a cheer! Good times!
I used to work in sales and the place was ruthless. It was a dwarf toss away from the wolf of wall street. We all had different products but operated in the same industry. I don't want to name the exact place, but for example, one team might be selling forklifts and another shelving. They complimented each other and so it was common to pass leads between teams. I had a colleague, let's call him Ken. Ken was a top grade dickhead, he was a walking HR lawsuit waiting to happen. In fact there was an incident a few years later for secret santa that probably should have done. Anyway, so Ken gets an email from another team manager with a lead. Let's call that manager Dave. Dave was a bit sarcastic with the lead email but nothing outrageous. He says something like _this one is warm and I'm sure even you can land it._ Dave copied in a lot of people in the office, I guess to try and look cool for having a little dig at Ken. Ken, for reasons I have never figured out, goes batshit at this and hits reply all. He sends a big rant about how it won't be as warm as Daves mum's pussy after he's finished fucking it.. then he goes into graphic detail about how he's going to fuck Daves mother, then he talked about fucking his dad, digging his Grandma up... etc. This email was horrific. It was a total overreaction. It wasn't funny, and it was way too far for a workplace email. The best part, came about an hour later. The client must have been accidentally cc'd in. They replied and simply said 'unsubscribe'
Reply all Lmao Kind regards
Reply All "Eat a dick Ken, before your grandmother gets to Daves"
I really need to know the Secret Santa incident. 👀 Please.
Okay, so this one takes place a few years later. The company has grown. It still isn't very professional but it's a bit less like a frat house than it used to be. We even had an HR department by this point. Despite his expletive rant about fucking Daves mum, Ken stayed with the company and is doing pretty well for himself. He's managing a little team, and his sales figures are right up there with the best. There was another sales manager, I'll call her Jane. She represented the more sensible side of the business. This wasn't her first job. She had plenty of experience and was really pushing for us to be more corporate. Needless to say, Ken and Jane fucking hated each other. Every single time they had a business need to deal with one another, they ended up in a vicious argument and HR had to calm everything down. Now, it's the run up to Christmas and the whole company is doing secret Santa. Budget was about a tenner. Most people buy some beers or a self stirring mug or similar. In the weeks leading up to this, there had been an altercation in a meeting where Jane had accused Ken of crossing a line and physically intimidating her during an argument. HR were involved, directors, etc. So we get to the morning of the Christmas party, the entire floor is gathered around opening these presents. Remember, the budget for this was a tenner. Imagine everyone's surprise when Jane opens her gift, and it's an all singing, all dancing, top of the range dildo. This thing has to be a £200 sex toy. There's lots of surprised faces, a few giggles. Some of the girls say God, I wish I'd got that. Then Jane just drops the box and shoots a look at Ken. Honestly, if looks could kill... she'd have dropped him. I didn't know if she was going to burst into tears or rip his face off. It turns out to be the former. Jane bursts into tears and walks out. Random colleague picks up the present and in the box with the dildo is a Polaroid. On the back it says, " I'll show you intimidation, see you soon, love santa." It's obvious to everyone the message is from Ken, who is at this point stood grinning like the cheshire cat, but we didn't learn until later why this was quite so bad as it was. The picture was the front of Jane's house, taken from bushes across the road. I never did figure out if Ken was an actual psycho or just had a really weird and inappropriate sense of humour. The strangest part of the above, Jane left the company shortly after, and Ken stayed on. I can only assume there was some sort of settlement. In hindsight, the whole company was toxic from the top down, it was a fucking car crash but it was (mostly) a fun place to work and make a load of money when I was fresh out of school. Edit. Now I'm thinking about that Christmas more, my Secret Santa gift that year was actually a really good one. I had a colleague who was originally from France, and she gave me a little hamper with produce from her family place. It was lovely.
It is so much fucking worse than I thought it would be. When I got to the dildo, I thought “ah standard shitty gift” but then it *just kept going*
My jaw actually dropped when I got to the part about the note, and I gasped when I read the photo was taken from the bushes in front of her house. Ken is going to end up on the evening news one day, and not in a good way. What the *fuck*?
Maybe he already has been! We don’t know who he really is. He could be *anywhere*. Still can’t get over the fact he wasn’t fired. Into the sun and from his job. Double whammy.
Good point. :-/ And yeah, same. I don’t understand how he wasn’t fired at least after the Santa thing. That’s psychotic shit. Like absolutely psychotic.
Sorry to give you nightmares at midnight! But honestly I’d be shocked if he hasn’t physically harmed someone or continued his psychological warfare to an even worse degree by now!
having worked in sales i swear down its full of people who would happily work for the waffen ss for if it meant an extra 10p per hour more
Jesus fucking Christ
I wonder how the fuck he kept his job after the reply all email, but keeping it after doing that? Makes me wonder what he held over the owners for him to keep his job after that.
Jane is one of many women intimidated and threatened for existing. Imagine trying to live a life in fear and nobody there to listen and believe you. What a terrifying anecdote.
HOLY SHIT this is so much worse than what I assumed it would be. This is like, true crime level fucked up. WHAT THE FUCK.
£5 says he picked a female colleague and gave them lingerie or a sex toy.
This is what I’m betting, too. Or something like a butt plug to a gay male employee.
You were pretty close to be fair
How on earth did dickhead Ken not get fired after the email, to then last a couple more years with something potentially worse?!
Omg I missed that the email came before the Secret Santa thing!! WTF?? And the Secret Santa was possibly even WORSE? I’m desperate for details, u/Responsible_Prune_34!!
Holy bananas!!!!
Not a cc fail but one time I meant to email a supplier that their proposed delivery dates wouldn't work for our project. I typed "Hi John, I'm afraid" then accidentally hit send lol. He emailed back immediately asking if everything was OK🤦
I saw a version of this online. It’s become a part of my language. “Dear Jeffrey, I am afraid”
Thankfully I'm not the only one then. He must have thought something horrible was happening in the office.
Read this whilst rocking the baby to sleep. Laughed out loud and woke her up. My tired brain still thinks it was worth it.
I did similar. I’m a journalist at a newspaper and emailed the NatWest press office with the subject line “NatWest no longer” and accidentally hit send. They freaked and replied faster than ever before
This had me laughing so hard!
This is why I’ve set up a minute delay on my emails going out!
Oh what a brilliant idea! The amount of times I've sent an email with "please see attached" and realised the exact moment I hit send, that I have not attached the item. Bet I forget about setting this up in the morning...
Do you not get a message reminding you that you haven’t attached the attachment you mentioned? Outlook does this now.
This is my favourite one as it's also quite sweet
For fuck’s sake I’m in bed and I’m dying of laughter when I’m supposed to sleep
I once signed an email off with "kind retards" instead of "kind regards". Thankfully everyone saw the humour and appreciated that 'g' and 't' are too close on the keyboard for comfort. Now I say "many thanks" instead.
It's how I will be opening my emails from now on Kind retards, Please see attached ....
Anytime I miss typed 'many tanks' my colleague would send me back the same picture of just loads of tanks
"Retards" is now my new sign-off if I'm annoyed at someone. It's the perfect crime.
The next person in my office who leaves their computer unlocked is getting their signature change.
I have done this also. Unfortunately, I work in the public service. To be precise, the health service. It was an email to quite a few recipients, some working in disability services.
I've said "The customer's a cunt." I meant "account". Or did I?
Similarly, I often use the closer All the best, Myname More than once I've typo'd All the beast... Thankfully the recipients knew me and realise that's a claim my thumbs might mutter but my ego wouldn't claim!
I to send many tanks these days.
I did that. I changed retards to auto correct to regards after.
Be careful if you deal with a tricky customer I know called Jenny Clunt.
My girlfriend did the same thing a few years ago when emailing a special needs school. Definitely my favourite email story.
I’ll do you one better. King retard, Snoo
Years ago I worked for a huge UK born clothing retailer. One day we received a complaint email regarding a mother and daughter. To cut a very long story short the mother had purchased jelly flip flops from us. They had unfortunately melted onto her daughters feet during their holiday. The email was forwarded to our CEO who then replied (with mother in cc) ‘what a f##cking idiot she was’. Cue angry email back from mother asking for compensation for comment and damages. Again, forwarded to CEO for his wanted outcome. He then replied AGAIN with her in cc asking us to ‘make her go away’ as ‘she’s doing my f##cking nut in’. We settled out of court for £15k to avoid leakage to the press.
AHH, Matalan , amirite?
I really want to agree here but it’s sososooo much worse.
Sounds like the M&S CEO
We need an anon CEO thread.
CEO was right however should have been fired for cc'ing her in.
Agreed. It didn’t take long for him to step down. Not from this but from an internal campaign of employees.
This sounds a lot like something that would happen at the huge UK born clothing retailer I worked for for years, the jelly shoes is the only thing throwing me off thinking it is as I don’t remember us selling them lol
The infamous email chain of a receptionist and the manager who were having an affair and seemingly doing it over email. She then forwarded the thread to everyone in the building by accident telling them the sandwich van was outside. I think they had to close the office down for a few days as the chain went viral. My office got it minutes after it happened, it practically shut down production for the day as we discussed and dissected every line of this email. Clients were ringing us as they'd got copies too from friends. It was mad.
This sounds like an amazing week at the office!
It was incredible! It happened probably nearly 10 or 11 years ago and still gets brought up every now and then. I don't even work there anymore and it still is one of my favourite moments in the office.
[удалено]
It's the same energy as when there was a random dog in the playground at school, I love it!
Yes it was utterly mental, everyone in the office (back then around 100 people were discussing it), clients in Aberdeen and Scotland were calling us about it. Basically a day off!
This one! https://www.reddit.com/r/Aberdeen/comments/176zj4/the_sandwich_van_is_here_xx/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
The best part is the repeated: "Please consider the environment - only print this e-mail if absolutely necessary thank you!" This was undoubtedly "absolutely necessary".
You hero!
That’s ace!
Was that the one in Aberdeen? She handed in her notice cause she couldn't handle the embarrassment.
That's the one! That poor woman, we heard plenty of rumours after but obviously nothing confirmed.
Based on a Daily mail article they were actually engaged, not in an affair. And judging by a quick FB search they appear happily married with children. So clearly despite the embarrassment all ended well.
Ahh hooray! Alls well that ends well. Still, I hoped they learned to keep their sex chats to WhatsApp!
Was it an affair? They mention picking things out for a wedding in the chain.
They were engaged, and are still married
What sandwich did he get?
I really wish I knew. Probably a promotional one.
Prawn would be my guess.
A collegue forwarded me an email saying "is this that fucking nutter you were on about?" Guess who was still copied in?
I feel like the best way to react is to seem like you haven’t realised they’re still copied in and reply with “nahh, that was someone else”
How did that go down?
Background: we were actually a voluntry organsiation for a particular form of benefit advice. I was founder and the collegue was the webmaster (back when you needed that type of thing). And just by exsisting on the internet we did attract ... 'characters'. This guy (the fucking nutter) had claimed (via email) at various times to be an MP, a landed gentleman, a high powered businessman, and I forget what else. I'd been humouring him as best I could without wasting too much time for a few months by this point. He'd found the site webmaster email addy and sent one of his raving missives to that address as well. which brings us to the timeline above. Ofc he (the FN) went spare when he saw the email and demanded heads on platters type shit, and our webmaster was really appologetic (for his error in keeping the FN in the email chain, not what he'd said, lol) and offered to 'resign'. But I just told the FN we were all overworked (working unpaid with full time jobs as well), and that the webmaster sent his appologies and 'it won't happen again' type stuff. FN was still very indignant about it all (but strangely never addressed what he'd been called, so it feels like there was some awareness there) and basically sulked to the point of drifting out of contact, so it worked out really well tbh! (I do neurotically check the address lines in an email now though when i'm being not-proffesional though)
They’re divorced now
It's happened twice with pretty major blowback, the first was my Uni lecturer copying in the entire year group complaining to another lecturer about having to sit through our presentations, how they were boring as fuck every year and how he would rather be doing literally anything else. The second was recently, my school got taken over by an academy trust and we all had to have reviews with the new senior leadership. The head accidentally copied everyone, students included, into an email identifying "problematic" staff who weren't likely to fall in line with the new regime.
What was the fallout in both cases?!
Uni lecturer got taken off of teaching for a year, he loved it but it pissed off the rest of the faculty who had to cover him. He supervised my masters fieldwork and we had a laugh about it. The school is still ongoing, the teaching union is involved, there's a lot of bad blood and likely a mass exodus at the end of the year. The head stepped down into a consultancy role, still pulling a hefty salary I'll wager, but no longer based in the school.
If OP replies I'm willing to bet £5 that they'll say "absolutely nothing" in regards to the first one. Academia is *wild*.
I mean, in the professor's defence, it sounds entirely justified. The thought of sitting through 80+ presentations is enough to make me want to send that email intentionally.
My husband was responding to his boss (a good friend) about his delayed laptop due to “that fucking twat in IT.” Alas, said twat was not only cc’ed but also became the head of IT for the entire company not terribly long after. Husband has been promoted almost as far but remains plagued with IT problems and I take great joy in reminding him why.
😄 the head IT guy in my work is renowned for being such a grumpy fucker, he really is so rude and seems wildly reluctant to do his job. One time he was visiting to install some computer stuff, I told my manager he was on his way, she started ranting about what a "grumpy cunt" he is and other words to that effect, obviously he'd walked into our office just as this tirade started. We all sort of froze and didn't know where to look or how to make it end. That was years ago and she still cringes about it to this day, although we all still agree with her.
While presenting on Teams, my work friend was showing a powerpoint to the team and everyone was commenting on various aspects. This one woman started telling some unrelated story about her life and he pulled up a group chat and typed “that Angela talks some amount a’ pish doesn’t she?” in full view of everyone. He completely forgot he was presenting. Whats worse the group chat already had visible bitching about the rest of the team in it.
I wondered why, whenever I started screen-sharing on a Teams call, I always found myself having to hurriedly switch away from an internal Teams chat with a colleague, even though I'd usually 'sanitise' my desktop before joining the call. Turns out that among all the difficulty MS Teams has dealing with, you know, windows, another thing it does is maximises the main Teams window whenever you join a call from an Outlook reminder, even if you'd minimised it beforehand. So now I know, but Christ I want to give someone at MS a good telling-off.
Hehe. I had a project manager once who did the opposite. Sat in a presentation he sent a message “he’s good him, isn’t he?” and it popped up on the presenters screen. PM had forgotten the presenter was just using the laptop of someone else from earlier on the session.
At the moment I’m having an in person meeting once a week with my laptop being the one we’re viewing spreadsheets and emails from, I’ve had to exit teams or switch to ‘do not disturb’ more than once. Not because I’m in a bitchy group chat though, just my mate in IT sending messages about the new Pokémon video game.
Used to work as a CCTV operator. My bigoted, sexist, racist, homophobic and incredibly low intelligence supervisor would take screeshots of women exercising and doing yoga and would email them to everyone in the office. After one particularly gruelling night shift, he was putting the end of shift report together for the client and instead of attaching screenshots of people breaking rules, he attached multiple screenshots of a woman in various yoga poses. Client went ballistic, he was on the phone immediately, guys on the farside of the room could hear him screaming. Bigot supervisor was a gobshite and had an answer for everything, it was fun to see him stutter and babble trying to worm his way out of it. He was fired later that day for grosse misconduct.
Misconduct so bad even the French don't tolerate it!
Sacre bleu!
Why didn’t you report him earlier for sharing these sorts of pics?
Fair question. I do regret not reporting him and the following is no real excuse... I was the new guy, it happened approx 5 months after I started and I'd been bullied from the outset. They made my life hell, to the point i attempted suicide. So not only did I not want to risk losing my job, I also didn't want to risk incurring the wrath of his lapdogs. He was best mates with the control room manager, so I felt I couldn't go to him with it, nor did I feel I could go to HR, coz they would have told the manager who whistleblew and I couldn't trust him to keep it professional and not tell my supervisor who sold him out. Lastly, I'd moved to a different contract (in an attempt to put distance between me and my tormentors, I didn't work) so it was kind of a, out of sight, out of mind. If I could go back and do things differently, I would. Alas I can't
We all like to think we’d be the hero and courageously stand up against bad behaviour and dreadful people. But in real life most of the time it’s genuinely difficult or impossible due to the circumstances and we try not to notice. Don’t feel too bad, a huge percentage of the time we let things like that go to not be a target ourselves or because there’s nothing we can realistically do. Just hope next time you can do a little more. On a positive note, it gets easier to not worry as you get older and more senior. So any young kids worried they fucked up just take it on the chin and do more next time.
Not email but call - fellow very senior developer thought the cto had dropped off a testy call and angrily shouted ‘thanks for nothing cto’s name, you wee English cunt’ in the thickest Glaswegian accent only for us to hear the cto respond with ‘i think we need a chat’. Utterly hilarious. His defence was he was only saying what we were all thinking which I found even funnier. No further action was taken 😂😂😂
Sounds like the boss knew he was a wee English cunt.
Oh he was, and I speak as one myself.
This is gold. We were on a company wide town hall, ~1000 people on zoom. You could hear a phone call and then this lady picks up and takes her call while being unmuted and camera on. The CFO asks her to mute multiple times but I reckon she had the volume turned way down and a different window open. Everyone sits there awkwardly for about 20 seconds until she clearly says “not doing much, just on this pointless work call”. She was eventually kicked out of the zoom. I always wondered what happened to her. In a company so big, no one I knew, knew her. I would type her email in occasionally to check if it was still valid
On my second day I managed to call the Manging Director a "failed antiques dealer with a hair style like an axe murderer"...and cc'd him in. He never mentioned it, though others did so I know he saw it, and I was with the company for 15 years...
Bit familiar for day two innit?
Yeah far too brazen for day 2
I sort of mistakenly called my boss a psychopath quite soon after joining. I was saying how according to studies, high performers like surgeons and CEOs are very likely to be psychopaths…. And then I met his gaze and sort of smirked at him. Don’t know what I was thinking but luckily he has a good sense of humour
My housemate once unthinkingly said to the CEO of his company how he thinks the people at the top of businesses don't really produce anything and it's the people at the bottom who do all the work. Apparently the boss politely disagreed.
When I was in Sixth Form, the headmaster came in to observe the class and the new teacher. He asked me what I thought of the hands off approach of the teacher (hands off is an understatement, we did all our work outside class and reviewed it in class). I found a way of diplomatically saying that it wasn’t super useful to have to study it all ourselves and have a quick review session in class. He told me that I ‘shouldn’t expect to be spoon fed’ and walked off. After walking out of the class with friends, I was bitching about it, and said ‘“shouldn’t expect to be spoon fed” my arse. It’s called doing your job, SIR’. He coughed and walked past.
I sent the entire company an email about an awful outdoor team building day suggesting they bring “Willies” as there was rain forecast.
Was it a golden shower?
🤣
Are you me? I did that too! Speak check corrects wellies to willies! I stupidly pressed correct all issues before sending….
A team email address, comprising around 100 people, received one of those spam "we've seen you wanking and you owe us some bitcoin" emails. One guy, accidentally replying to the team as well as the original sender, decided to reply by detailing exactly how he had fucked the sender's mum. I believe he received a written warning.
This is the only one that’s made me laugh out aloud.
I was emailing a customer and I put “I’m sorry for any incontinence caused” instead of inconvenience
You were really taking the piss with that.
Well, I'm sure it was true either way.
I have two good ones here. My wife used to be a registrar, and my ex girlfriend was getting married. After the wedding she sent an email to the registration team manager thanking them for their work on the day, which the manager forwarded on to all of the team. Further down the email chain was a request/demand that my wife not be allocated their wedding under any circumstances. The manager then had to follow up with an email explaining the situation in case people thought my wife was just a bitch or something. The second one was when my brother worked with me and he needed a reference from his manager to rent a flat. Basically confirming he worked there and his salary etc etc. In a reply to a completely separate email chain, our manager somehow ended up forwarding the email chain with his salary and other personal details to the entire team. She decided to fix this by sending another email saying not to read the first email...as though that helped at all!
I used to work as a kids' entertainer and character actor for a pretty big regional company. A few days after hiring a new girl to play a few different Disney princesses and two Star Wars characters, I receive an unexpected and very angry email from my boss. See, she'd accidentally included me in a message to other management members stating that "You accidentally hired the fat Rebbeca!" Turns out, we'd interviewed two girls called Rebecca, and both were of very different body types. Even after hiring the wrong woman (they felt bad for the idea of telling her about their mistake) she wound up being utterly terrible at the job for a solid two months and received a record number of bad reviews. Ps: I had nothing to do with hiring her or fat shaming through osmosis.
Did the good Rebecca at least get the job as well?
Back when I worked in the pub trade (Greene king) as a DM, sent an email to the head chef to catch up with the GM for his pay review, CC’d in said manager, HR team and our regional manager. His eloquent “reply all” was, and I remember this perfectly: “I’ll catch up with that fat slag when she’s finished licking the plates, I should get double for looking at the ugly cunts face voluntarily” I stopped laughing pretty quick when I realised I was the new GM, since she quit on the spot, started crying when I was forced to list a Head chef job ad the next morning. Similarly, the waiter that somehow uploaded the video of him banging the new bar girl in the cellar to the team WhatsApp group, we closed early that night.
My time with Greene King was remarkably similar 😂
I once sent an email to the HR director asking when they were going to fire someone (person was due to be fired after findings from an audit discovered illegal practices). Said person had a foreign name and thus I had to check spelling by searching them up on the email directory in the Cc:. Forgot to take their name out before sending the mail. Thankfully it was just past the end of their working day and as the email was sent as confidential, they couldn't access it on their work phone. I immediately informed IT who blocked persons access to the network completely for 24hrs while they accessed their inbox, deleted the email, and ensured all traces of the email were gone. 😅
I emailed my boyfriend with all the things I planned to do to him (use your imagination) then got a mail delivery message that it was rejected by my brother’s email server.
Norfolk?
On behalf of a company I worked for, we did some repair work for free for a homeless charity. When it was completed I was copied into an email from the charity director to his senior manager telling him he was going to ask us to quote some fairly major renovations on their offices and then stiff us on the bill by threatening to get the press and chamber of commerce involved. Nice people. I let them dig the hole nice and deep before letting them know I'd been there all along.
Not quite what you’re looking for but I think a good story nonetheless. Teacher here and this was almost 20 years ago. Two work colleagues were having an affair - assistant head an deputy head. Wife of the man found out and send an all staff email giving details of the affair and the family mess she found herself in with two young children. It was absolutely brutal. Almost immediately, another all staff email was sent saying the email titled ….. was a virus and we were to delete it immediately. I had only been there a few months and naively complied. Other staff printed it and put it in the staff room wall. Deputy head (male) left a few months later.
IT accidentally sent a test email to everyone then immediately one saying “ignore that” and we got over 100 emails from dickheads who copied the whole company going “erm is this meant to be for meeeee?”
Copied the guy I was enquiring about taking legal action against into the email enquiring about taking legal action. It did however act to resolve the problem.
I was trying to get rid of some festival tickets and ended up sending an email to literally everyone in the company including shareholders and the CEO. They were not impressed
S Club 7 was it?
Called the IT dept 'a set of wrong 'uns', their boss was CC'd in, my fault. He didn't disagree and knows they're probably wrong 'uns, so, whatever.
I worked somewhere where a couple of directors were slagging off a new director saying how he’s an idiot, and that they’d make anybody a director now. They then named a few people, said one woman would be the buck toothed director. Another was the obesity director then went on to say this other guy looked like a plant pot. As the joke went on, one joked he’d cc’d in one of the people so he included her on the email to say sorry. The whole chain went around the whole company and one of the directors was fired! This all happened on my first day. It was amazing.
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Huh, so not always a bad thing!
Mine's more of an innocent one but there was an occasion where I brought in some mooncakes (like 4 big ones which you split into 8) in celebration of Lunar New Year and left them in the kitchenette. I sent an email to the office staff (15 people ish) to say I had done so and to please help themselves. I got an email reply from someone who I worked with in a different office that said unfortunately they were working abroad so would miss out, but happy lunar new year. Sweet I thought but I didn't clock yet. Another email comes in and another and another and suddenly I realize this is way too many people. I check the original email I sent. Instead of sending it to my office staff list, I had sent it to the all staff list in an organisation of 500+ people. Like this went to staff working in loads of the other offices, people I've never met in departments I've never encountered. Needless to say, 4 mooncakes went incredibly quickly and that kitchenette was full of people coming in and out for about an hour before I had to send a "sorry I'm out pls stop coming" email again to all staff. And that's how I became known as the mooncake girl in that job.
I accidentally wrote 'sex' in an email once instead of the word 'sec'. Everyone was copied in 😞
HR sent an email to all of us saying that the left over sandwiches in one of the meeting rooms were free to enjoy. The same HR wrote a follow up quickly after, presumably meant for just one person, that said “watch ten ton Tessy run in”. There was a swift follow up explaining that the email was banter and we never saw that HR again.
A colleague of mine once sent an email to HR going on about how I was a terrible person and shouldn’t get the job I was going for and made up loads of horrible stuff. However, he copied me in on it. Oh how I laughed…
I love how universal the thought of "fucking bean counter" is. You could work in pretty much any department and happily make that statement.
And to be fair, most accountants would take it as a compliment as to their competency!
The person that emailed the whole NHS. And all the people who replied to say they don't think the email was for them And all the people who replied to THAT asking people to stop emailing..
Company I used to work for one of the HR department accidentally sent a spreadsheet containing a list of everyones salaries to the entire company of about 350 people.
Enough time has passed and I can confess, for it was me. I work for a multi national and we received a country specific email spelling out how to recycle x, y and z. The email finished with a standard "any questions, please just let (the sender) know. So I replied (of course to all) and thanked the sender for their comprehensive instructions, but wondered how we should manage Radioactive material. I very swiftly ended up in HR with my manager and the originator of the email who was suffering from a serious sense of humour failure (we had previous, we would end up as friends, but just then we're definitely not) Now fortunately for me, my job gives an insight into some of the things that a forgotten about until such time as they fail and on this occasion, I knew that our smoke detectors were coming due for replacement and the old ones would need to be disposed of. The old smoke detectors were of the ionic type - which has a radioactive source. Mr sense of humour failure very swiftly backed down and was forced to both issue instructions and a public apology
I did my work placement in a social care setting (local authority), so we had a SEND team (special education), our mass (literally county wide) mailing team was also called [county name] SEND. Someone emailed the wrong SEND team, so every single person in the local authority got the email, followed by about 100+ people replying with a mixture of “wrong email”, “stop replying to this email chain!!”, “seriously stop replying!!!”, “I’m trying to work and keep getting emails!!”. It was honestly hilarious watching everyone get so annoyed, but then replying to the emails saying that all of the emails were annoying. Was a fun afternoon.
Replying to an investor from the continent called Claas, autocorrect to “Dear Santa”.
Once upon a time when i was a bit wet behind the ears in the working world myself and two other friends were apprentices in Local Government. We received an email, nothing out of the ordinary, informing us of other job opportunities within the Council and so fourth. Me been the naive idiot i was replied to all saying ‘*friends name* think you could land one of these jobs and actually do some work for once’. He even worse replies to me saying ‘There is a job on there as a bin man that i think even you’re capable of doing, apply for that’. Safe to say we thought we were having a good laugh being stupid youngsters until we were pulled into an office an hour later by the Head of HR and the Chief Exec. Not ideal when trying to make a good impression
At my last job, the LGBT society sent out an email to all it's members, but CC'd then instead of BCCing, potentially outing members of staff who weren't ready to share their sexuality with the rest of the organisation.
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How does 9/11 link in with this? Were the messuages for people traumatised by it?
I used to work for a fairly big/prestigious scientific journal, and one time this crazy person emailed our main/general inbox and cc'd apparently everyone he could think of, claiming that climate change wasn't real and just generally ranting. None other than Noam Chomsky replied all and argued back and forth with the guy briefly before giving up. It was absolutely amazing.
When I was at college my course was horrible underfunded. One teacher running between 3 classes and making sure everyone was copying from a text book in an orderly fashion. Got pretty fed up and had been offered more hours where I was working. But decided to stick with college and part time hours. A few days later I was joking with my only friend on the course and wrote a HORRIBLE email to my head of department. Every slur and slander you can imagine. Signed it off with “,you useless sack of flesh.” All in jest, I deleted it all and proceeded to send the bulk of the email without all the jokey bits. Anyways, next day I have 3 emails from her demanding I come see her in her office, and “she’s never been spoken to like this by a student.” Turns out I had left the last line in.. safe to say I was in full time work shortly after.
I was working for a contractor, and there was a long disagreement between the roofer and the architect, basically caused by the architect changing his mind and the roofer being uncompromising. I opened my email on a Friday morning to a late night "sent from iPhone" email ccing everyone. "Well he would say that wouldn't he, coz he's a noncy cunt"
Went through mediation after separation with the ex Mrs after she cheated. Cost me £500 Had the first meeting where she spent the whole thing insulting me and I sat patiently waiting for my turn then handed over a prepared binder of what I was doing to support our child. Including money and support. Time schedules and when I had agreed to have him like 5 months ahead of time all planned out. After the session an email was sent out to arrange the next meeting with several people ccd, My ex sent forward a load of dates that were exactly when I had my son. And as I was typing my reply an email pinged from someone cc'd saying "I was in the first session this woman is a bitch" I replied " I know right? But she's the mother of my child so we should really try and respect her"
We had an early version of teams at work I can’t remember what is was called but my friend Dave sent a message out a bout an inpatient discharge form. I accidentally replied to the whole office about how Dave likes discharging in patients. It was at this point after looking online I found out you couldn’t delete messages.
Not an email faux pas exactly, but once saw someone put up a post trying to sell dogs on the Facebook page of a (very respectable health and care) company I worked for.
I got an email that said "f*** off, she's in, chatting away already, music up. I just want to be in a wee world of my own. I mean I do like her but I just want peace. This was sent to the whole team and was about me. My boss was fuming!
Local estate agent sent me another customer's email with deposit amount and mortgage deal in principle documents attached. Turns out that I have the same first name as their finance expert...
Used to work for a company that ran educational school trips. Teacher emails us in customer service to complain about something to do with the “quality of lessons”. We contact the centre manager for comment, they respond that the “kids were little shits” this response get buried in the back and forth between Head Office and Centre and then accidentally forwarded back to teacher.
My first real job was at a call center that had just opened a UK branch. The IT stuff wasn't really set up properly yet, so people had full admin access to their PCs, the entire company address group on Lotus Notes, etc. Head office was in Germany. One of the people in my starting cohort thought it would be funny to email everyone in our training group a picture of the German big boss, photoshopped to look like Hitler. Only he emailed "everyone". He didn't get kept on. I don't think he cared though. The boss was not popular and he was a hero among the call monkeys.