to ask what's the best accidental email you've seen?

[travellerist]

Literally an hour ago an email went round to all staff/managers at my work requesting if anyone needed webcams/headphones for remote meetings.

One of my colleagues is friendly with the email sender and I guess he meant to hit reply with his response but instead hit reply all, and his response was...

"That’s the best laugh I’ve had in months…

Web Cams, seriously… have you any idea how ugly half of these people are ? Not seeing them is the best part of working from home… Face Masks are the best thing since sliced bread 😊

Headset, Nah… I’d probably stand up and drag the PC into the kitchen. Don’t suppose you can get ink cartridges though ?"

I'm guessing he's going to hear from HR pretty soon, but it got me wondering if anyone else has some "whoops" email stories?

@chrislilleyswig Sandwich van incident

I used to work in the MOD. A few years ago, there was the Peter Kay spoof version of Tony Christie's Amarillo song, and in turn, some people deployed in Afghanistan decided to spoof the spoof.

Lots of people decided to send it back to the UK through the MOD email system, and given it was a large file being sent repeatedly, it crashed the MOD email system for hours, perhaps the whole day.

Upshot was that we were all banned from sending this video anywhere, and it was put onto our MOD intranet so that people could see it without crashing the system again. I must say it was very good

[quote MulticolourMophead]**@chrislilleyswig Sandwich van incident[/quote]
Thank you. I must have missed the link

I thought I had sent an email to my colleague but had sent it to a new client who's first name was the same. The email said he was a useless dick-head who doesn't know shit, loves the sounds of his own voice and spends every spare hour jerking off in the bogs watching porn on his phone. He definitely did. Everybody knew. I got fired.

@ImRealHonest

‘I need the whole team to resign immediately’

I sent it.

I meant to sign again. Not quit their jobs. I got a few panicked phone calls about that one.

I’ve done this, sent as a subject line to my Director as his PA

No other content than “I need you to resign by cob today please”

He sent back “That’s not how we normally do it Gazing....”

@chrislilleyswig don't think it was linked, just referred to.

I once had an email from a man at the council that I'd recently been in touch with regarding a building regs survey for my extension. Quite out the blue, a few days after our last exchange of very dull emails I got: "Mike is out of the office this morning if you fancy a quick fumble in the cupboard before he gets back?".
I was a bit and replied suggesting that he'd emailed me in error. Turns out that the lady on reception at the council has the same first name as me and her made an error in his haste to email her. He begged me not to report him .
The site visit at our house the following week was interesting. DH couldn't stop smirking at him and the poor bloke was clearly mortified.

[quote MulticolourMophead]**@chrislilleyswig Sandwich van incident[/quote]
Just reminded me of another one (joys of being an executive PA for too many years...)

We hired a new receptionist who started off fine and after a few months her true colours started to show and it all went wrong, lateness, leaving early for “emergency appointments” I’m a fair person so I monitored it and gave her feedback until post started going missing mainly cheques were noticed more than invoices because we were missing money coming in aka I’d be up for a rollocking during finance meetings.

She then went short notice absent for a day because someone apparently smashed her car windscreen for no reason.

I took the opportunity to sit on reception with my laptop to cover and have a look about, of course I found all the missing cheques so I asked IT for her email access due to absence and oh my! I can’t even go in to everything I found but the worst one was her emailing someone who had recently attended training and her emailing him telling him she had his pen he left behind and it was in a package under reception with his name on it.

The package included a note along with her hair brush tangled with her hair noting where she had put the handle whilst thinking of him.

If that wasn’t grim enough she also sent him a link to a news article about him being done for assaulting a police officer at a recent event.

He was sacked in his probation period for the above and I managed to dismiss her a month or so later

Nightmare

At university I had an email address one character different to someone who led some sort of animal research.

I received an email meant for him that started by describing how "the marmosets are having fisticuffs over the marshmallows" which sounded pretty cute.

It went on to describe the slices of marmoset brain that the researcher was looking at .

The Chartership Officer for my professional body once emailed me and asked me for Sunday lunch. Although it’s a fairly small profession, and I see him a few times a year professionally, this was somewhat surprising.

Turns out that I have the same first name as his (adult) granddaughter.

2 weeks in to a new job for a big well known PLC, I was typing up an email with various attachments to send to the CEO, when someone asked what the company wide email address was, I typed All in to the To bit and let her know the full address. Finished my email and sent it, obviously without deleting the All. It went to over 3000 people at multiple sites and contained highly confidential details about a takeover bid we were about to launch, lots of stock market implications etc. IT did their best to recall it, but it must have been seen by many, I didn't live that down for the 10 years I worked there.

Not an email, but a former colleague who hated his job used to write a personal blog in which he moaned about it quite a lot, referring to his 'Evil Boss' etc without revealing what the job was - until one day he included the company name but substituted part of the name with the word 'bastard'. So imagine if it had been, let's say, Sainsbury's (it wasn't), he'd have called it 'Bastardbury's' in the blog IYSWIM.

Inevitably somebody from the company eventually saw it (this was in the early 2000s before social media proper, so they had to have been looking, but idk exactly how it happened). He got fired for gross misconduct, because even though the blog was written in his spare time, they said it brought the company into disrepute as it was quite a nationally well-known company which would have been immediately identifiable from his bastardisation (see what I did there? ) of the name. Plus he'd said stuff about the city where he lived, which even meant the exact location could be pinned down and thus identify individuals.

Pretty stupid of him tbh, but at the time it was shocking because it was the first time I'd ever heard of anyone getting fired for something they'd done outside of work, and we were all kind of still in that innocent mindset that we could post stuff online and it was still somehow 'private'. Now of course, looking back, it was a real taste of things to come, with the way people can now be hounded and fired over old tweets etc.

30 years ago whilst in someone's office waiting for something I read the minutes of a senior management meeting in bullet points that was lying on the desk open. I was drawn to my friend's name.

It reference giving them notice despite having assured him he had 12 months more work on the project.

His boss was a bit of a twat and didn't like the high daily rate my friend was on.

The plan was to give him notice Christmas week which was shitty, the timing could have left him out of work in January etc.

I didn't hesitate to give him a heads up.
He put the feelers out immediately and secured a new contract two weeks later and gave his one week notice that he was gone.

His twat manager tried to give him a bollixing about it, leaving the whole project in the lurch...but he told him he knew that he intended him to be finished just before Christmas, despite telling him that he would finish the job.

Result was manager was really stuck, found it very difficult to replace my friend, client was hopping mad, and twat ended up being rightly screwed over daily rate wise with the guy who eventually accepted the job...niche area...word had gotten out about what had occurred and that twat was now desperate.

One guy I managed transferred to another role I emailed his gaining manager as sometimes training can be duplicated .
Meant to say please be aware X has transferred auto correct replaced it with transgender.
His new manger told me all pleased with herself that she had done welcome interveiw .Highlighting how diverse and inclusive they are .All the staff had been told about him being transgender and an inappropriate comments or behaviour would not be tolerated and they would be disciplined .

I work for an organisation run by a group of trustees who have for years mostly simply turned up for a meeting once a quarter, rubber-stamped managements's proposals, had a cosy chat and fucked off. Since lockdown, however, they've had to do some actual work and have been pretty useless, the problems being compounded by a couple of middle-aged rather inadequate men who like throwing their weight around and have astonishingly poor skills in handling people. They decided that they would exclude managers from their meetings because they had to decide on things like furloughing, with the result that they began making various decisions about the organisation as a whole without the benefit of any advice from someone actually working on the ground about what was and was not practicable. The stupid thing was, however, that most lack basic email skills and kept getting the recipients wrong, with the result that the staff were regularly indulged with full details of their latest twatty proposals and minutes of meetings that they weren't meant to see, and were therefore regularly able to head them off at the pass. From the point of view of people at one remove, like me, it's all been mildly amusing, which is just as well whilst having to deal with the stress of wondering whether these idiots are going to run the organisation into the ground.

@CharmingB

I recently sent a job offer to someone with an email address *@hotmail*.com. I received a very nice email back thanking me, but that she lived in India, hadn't recently attended an interview in London and that perhaps I'd got the email address wrong!

Oops! Who knew there was a difference between .co.uk and .com?! (OK, so probably everyone except me, but thank goodness it didn't contain any personal data!)

hotmail is a bugger for that. I share my .co.uk address with a young man who has .com.

I've had all sorts of interesting emails intended for him. The best one was an invitation to his friend's commercially organised stag do. I was 63 at the time (& female, obv!)

I emailed a couple of juniors with some corrections to their work as a leaening aid and signed off 'regards'. Only i was typing too quickly and hit the t instead of g.

Not quite the same, but a few months ago I managed to send a nonsensical customer feedback email to 350,000 customers with the title "REVIEW DEMO".

I was testing something and used the wrong data 🤣

A simple one but a goodie: friend I used to work with was quite ambitious and promoted very quickly (she was great at her job tbf)
She got her first management role and with a new team created under her. Sent a copy and paste email to everyone allocated to her welcoming them to her new team.
Only she managed to type

'Really happy to have you on my new teat'

That's one spell check doesn't help with!

Email from the school to all parents a letter intended for a particular parent whose child had got in some trouble with another child and the parent had taken matters into their own hands.

It was a pretty serious warning to the parent and stuff about them not being allowed on school premises without prior arrangement and an escort.

Really cringeworthy and swiftly followed up with a please delete previous email message

CEO of a major multinational emailed the whole company asking if anyone had seen his glasses.

Sent a follow up an hour later saying he'd found them on his head.

Not sure if it was an unintentional email or if he was turning a bit senile. He retired not long after.

Lovely man, but how he ever got into a position of authority is a mystery.

A parent who is a nurse carer for the elderly sent me a photo of one of her clients bottoms 🙈
Another parent sent me a link to her CV. She was trying to upload a picture of her sons hospital appointment.

I’ve received ones with “Kind Retards” as the sign off.

Also I used to work in a dept dealing with subsidence claims and when the tree roots dry out the soil it’s called “dessication”. Of course I got a whole email that had been audio typed by my secretary where this was substituted with “defecation”
Eg “there’s some significant defecation in the far corners of the garden”

I was in a meeting with about 15 other people, and one bloke was sharing his screen on the large meeting room screen for a presentation. After he'd finished, he started writing an email about ME but forgot to turn off screen sharing. We all sat staring at the email (which was extremely discriminatory and hugely damaging to him and the company..) for a few minutes.

Eventually my boss said to him "mate you're still sharing your screen"

Back in the early days of the internet, I worked at a big media company. One of my colleagues was a bloke who was both sleazy and dim. His job involved daily TV appearances.

He left a print out of his profile with an adult hook-up site on the printer. Apparently he had 8 inches for your pleasure. The ad included the classic line: “Due to the public nature of my job, I’d appreciate discretion” — and his work email address.

He was fired soon after, for repeatedly ignoring warnings about watching porn at his desk.