Monday, January 15, 2007

Email. It's not a new thing.

Today for approximately the one zillionth time (did I make up that number? I'm really not sure) I opened up an email from someone I don't even WORK with that was a "Reply to All".

Here's how it usually goes:

1)Company A sends out an email to everyone in the entire company, all the contractors, all the subcontractors, their moms, and possibly some dead people. Usually the email is something boring and stupid that I wouldn't care about even if I worked for Company A.

2)People who work for company A, in a state of mass confusion, click on REPLY TO ALL instead of just reply.

3)Chick's inbox is flooded with comments such as "I wish they'd put more money in OUR RETIREMENT FUND instead of this stupid stadium!" and "My password is not reset and you told me it would be reset by MONDAY and today is MONDAY and it's not reset and when are you going to reset it?" (And by the way, LEARN TO USE PUNCTUATION. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. I find it amazing that you are an engineer and probably make like, four billion dollars a year and you don't know what constitutes a sentence. I mean, come ON.)

4) Chick sits on her hands lest she reply back to them something along the lines of, "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD COULD YOU JUST HIT 'REPLY' AND STOP HITTING 'REPLY TO ALL'? Because NO ONE CARES. The person you INTENDED this message for doesn't care! STOP IT."

Because, you know, that's not good corporate etiquette.

I've been using email for a good 10 years now and I've learned a lot in that time (some of it thanks to the handy "recall" feature that AOL offers me). Honestly, it amazes me that in this day and age people do not know the difference between "reply" and "reply to all".

Unless they really ARE trying to share with 4000 people that their password isn't reset.

In which case, I DON'T CARE.

3 comments:

Em said...

LOL...very funny. I am the tech coordinator at the school where I work...and trust me, the legions of those who don't know and/or don't care is overwhelming. And they are the same people who continue to forward stupid SPAM e-mails to everyone in the building!! Grrrrr

Amy W said...

We get that all the time as well. Plus, I get sick of getting the emails to all 7,000 employees of the health system I work with that "my phone number is not a fax machine".

Brown Eyed Girl said...

This is one of my biggest pet peeves.

We recently had this happen..when our operations manager sent out an email asking if anyone was having trouble with the new voice mail system.

I got about 100 emails with all kinds of problems.

I also had to sit on my hands or I might have replied.

"True Dat"

of

"What he, she and it said."

"Yeah, me 1,099!"