Jul 11, 2008

Reply all

As most of you are probably aware I work for a software company. It's a great place to work and includes some of the brightest minds the industry has to offer. In this company we have many vendors and contractors who may handle a specific order of business that often times does not include software development or support. I don't expect a computer user to be a tech god any more than I expect a car owner to be a great mechanic; however I do ask both to use some common sense of proper usage.

Someone created an email alias and for some reason included a few thousand of us by mistake. Of course an employee sent an email to said alias which hit a wide distribution of people. I looked at the email and wondered why I'm even on the list as the message had nothing to do with my department. I went to an internal link to remove myself from the list, but before I could click the remove button I started getting swamped with e-mails.

Yes numerous folk were hitting reply all to ask to be taken off the distribution list, which they need to do themselves. Then there were those who hit reply all to tell people not to reply all. Then there were those that got angry and left nasty messages to people to not hit the reply all button. Over and over again my inbox was hit with another message. Each being the same as the one previously. It just wouldn't seem to stop. Even after people left instructions on how to remove yourself from the group there were mentally incompetent folks that still insisted on replying all and ignoring the proper procedure.

In the span of a half an hour I received at least 40 emails about this. I shook my head in disbelief. I mean I work for some of the brightest minds of our time. How can people act with such wanton displays of jackassery?

Then I received this gem:

'There are days I sit back in meetings after seeing people come up with great solutions to very hard problems and wonder how in the world we could be so lucky to have so many smart people working in this great company of ours… In fact, I sometimes doubt my own abilities and should I even be here based on how smart the people are around me. Most of the time I don’t even feel worthy of being in their presence…

Then there are days where I see the below… and I know I deserve to be here… if nothing else to send out emails like this.

Use: http:
//_____ please to remove yourself from the alias… geeezzz….

xxx


PS: Thanks for making me feel worthy…'


Beats my idea of just taking the alias of each person who hit reply all, compose an email, and say "I can't believe some of you jackasses make more money than me".

The emails are still coming, up to over 50 now. This is comical.

"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure." - Mark Twain

9 comments:

Mattbear said...

Awesome.

That dude is probably going to get in trouble, though. Unfortunately.

I haven't seen a "remove me reply all" shitstorm in a few years...good to know that tradition hasn't died out completely.

Scott said...

Gotta love it!

Mizzle said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Mizzle said...

Yeah I was not on that, but it was mocked on the failboat...plus I would hate for my OOF to go insane with it all...

JLee said...

Oh geez...
I have a friend who sends emails to a group and ALWAYS people hit "reply to all". So I'm getting a bazillion emails from people I don't know. I think I've used "reply to all" once in my life and don't understand why in the hell people feel the need to do that when they are only wanting the person sending it to read it!!! Pet peeve...pet peeve.

Claire said...

Dude. The dreaded 'reply all' function. When will people learn not to abuse it?

Cxx

Big Ben said...

The reply all can be very annoying, I don't use it very often. I am very surprised how some people with great intellect lack common sense.

mungsprout said...

Ah yes, I do not miss that bs. That reply was priceless however..

Anonymous said...

I heart my "delete" button. One key stroke says it all.