I received an irate email from a customer regarding our software and how it was crashing his machine. Since I knew the error would never be fixed, I emailed my boss in QA and said "How can we respond to this guy. I need to be crafty." After I hit send, my boss came running down the hall and told me I had CC'ed her on the email but sent it directly to the client. She ran to the email server room to try and delete it but it was too late. Ooops.

I won't even tell you about the time I was having an IM conversation with someone in another cube about a nasty co-worker, only to realize I was IM'ing that co-worker.

Can I get an amen?

Hey,
Did you see KevinSKomsvold's post on metachat? What an idiot. I can't believe he shared those stupid moments with everyone. Loser!

- agropyron

Hey,

Can you believe how much that agropyron sucks? Agropyron looks like Bea Arthur after she wakes up with a whiskey hangover.

-SassHat

My ex-fiance once did this with an email from mother to him that he forwarded to me and, in the cross replies got sent to her, obviously, regarding her. The content of which was honest but unflattering.

I will never, ever, forget the subject line from him: "Houston, we have a problem", refreshing my browser and experiencing my very first online colonoscopy.

From *my* mother, that is.

Agropyron, nicely played!

Also forgot to mention the one time I thought I had logged off my desktop sharing session with a client and started surfing. Normally the client shares with me but this session, I had to share my desktop. I'm just glad I didn't surf to my usual NSFW places.

aw hell, I did that. Sent a huge email to my friend about a boy I had a big crush on, all the stuff we had done, my opinions on the other girl he was semi-dating (bitch!) etc. etc. Only problem is that my friend (boy) and crush both had the same names. So I sent the one *about* Dave F *to* Dave F instead of Dave C. Stupid pull-down nicknames.

Didn't realise until Dave F replied back to me all "um..."

I have done this too many times to count. I've always managed to explain it away, though.

When I was doing student government stuff a few years back I emailed a bunch of people who were meant to be helping me on a project that I'd taken over from a previous student senator. I forgot I'd cc'ed her on the email and did a minirant on how she'd left crappy instructions and wasn't being any help. When she called me on it, all I could say was, "Yeah, I, uh, worded that badly. I meant you're so...busy. Yeah."

I had some East-coast coworkers leave me a voicemail at about 4 am Pacific time. They left a very polite message asking me to call them when I woke up, then they THOUGHT they hung up. In reality, they recorded a nice 6 or 7 minute rant about how lazy and irresponsible my group was, and how they could never get anyone on the phone.

hey baby, whats up?

See also.

Sent a huge email to my friend about a boy I had a big crush on, all the stuff we had done...

When I was dating a girl who had the same name as one of my best friends I was anxious enough about this possibility to double-check every single e-mail I sent to either of them to make sure I didn't screw it up. In fact I still do.

I was at a major financial corp in 1999 and there was a rumor of layoffs. As a consultant on the Y2K systems changeover I was immune, but lots of employees were obviously tense. Somebody sent out a company-wide e-mail on not sharing rumors with the press because it affected the stock price etc., but didn't set it for no-reply. Somebody replied. It was a dimwitted question that may have been intended for her workgroup, but it went to everybody. That was bad enough.

The problem was that people started replying to her, telling her, in varying degrees of helpfulness and bitchiness, that she shouldn't be doing that. And the corp was worldwide and people in different time zones kept coming to work and reading the e-mail and maybe not having the whole trail of CCs yet so they added their own. The thing kept ballooning until there were something like 400 replies, some of them profane and angry, and a lot of the tension about the rumors was coming out as bitterness, resignation, passive-aggressiveness, and so on.

The thing started late on a Thursday, I think, and continued over the weekend -- they had fixed the original post but the individual e-mails that came in were all replyable and it kept going and going like the Energizer bunny. Late in the game it developed a conversational, threadlike quality, a virtual watercooler that was all out in the open, very strange.

I remember my husband's first couple of cell phones, that didn't have a lock, and since I was often the last person he had called, and he kept the phone in his pants pocket, I would often get these strange calls that would just be from wherever he was - him talking to other people, all the ambient noise. I could tell if he was in a restaurant, on the street, in a car, who he was with and what they were talking about. Lots of room for trouble there... But he always came up smelling like roses. I can imagine that a lot of other people have not been so lucky.