Miss Communications

Wanted: Stupid E-Mails

When's the last time someone asked you for a stupid e-mail?

In real life, I speak on creating smarter e-mails, and true stories are always the funniest and most memorable part. For example, people love the graphic designer who mistakenly wrote to her client, "Could we please whine a little more?" They adore the manager who meant to sign off "Regards," but called his team "Retards," instead.

Some of the stories are embarrassing. Some of the stories are shocking. And some of the stories are pee-in-your-pants funny. But a lot of the stories are too naughty to repeat in a crowd. Yes, mistakenly replying-to-all with a joke about oral sex is hilarious. But it doesn't play on stage.

So I'm on the hunt for more genuine stories about people who have made terrible gaffes in e-mail - stories that can be told in a roomful of professionals. Maybe you have a co-worker who typed something so badly, his or her phrasing couldn't be understood. Maybe your manager buried an important request in a boring diatribe that nobody could be expected to read. Or maybe you've embarrassed yourself in front of all the wrong people because you forgot to pause and think before you hit Send. 

Please add your story in the comments below and hide any details (names, companies, etc.) that you don't want revealed. If I use your tale, I'll send you an autographed copy of my upcoming book, "Smart People, Stupid E-Mails" when it hits the stands.

We all know there are a lot of stupid e-mails out there, and from my point of view, the more, the merrier. So please feel free to launch this request out into the e-mailsphere. And thanks, in advance, for the stupid e-mails.

"Reply to All"? Aw, How Bad Could it Be?

It’s only mid-January, so we can still talk about New Year's resolutions – right? After all, they're certainly talking about them at the State Department. There, every employee has been officially admonished to break a specific habit: "reply to all."

Yes, after a deluge of e-mails flooded everyone's computers and nearly brought the communications system to its knees, America's diplomats have been warned to cut back on "reply to all" – or else.

It all started stupidly enough, as these things often do. Someone sent a blank e-mail to every single employee at the State Department's Washington headquarters as well as to its personnel overseas; several thousand recipients overall. Why the blank e-mail? No one's fessing up – but it was probably just a simple mistake.

After receiving the blank blunder, a bunch of employees responded in a don't-waste-my-time-and-the-taxpayers'-money fashion: They told the pesky sender to stop bothering them. But a whole lot of them did it in an oops-I-forgot-not-to-waste-people's-time-and-the-taxpayers'-money sort of way: They hit "reply to all."

If you work in a big office, you know exactly what happened next: The original wave of stupid e-mails was followed by a secondary wave when a bunch of additional people got in on the hey-don't-bother-me act. Then the secondary wave was followed by a tertiary wave when a new crop of workers decided to weigh in as well – "in often less than diplomatic language," the reports tell us.

Finally, the State Department sent a message telling everyone to stop the madness and warning of "disciplinary actions" for those who didn’t obey.

As business-communication habit-quitting goes, "reply to all" is a good one to consider. It's lazy ("I don't know who really needs it, so I’'l just let them all sort it out"), and it wastes a lot of time ("Ooh, here's another important incoming message related to – wait a minute, this isn't part of my work at all. Now, where was I …?") It also bogs down network traffic, and when there are attachments involved (anybody up for a 50 MB PowerPoint file?), it hogs storage, too.

Of course, we all know that. And when we're replied-to-all on a message that has no relevance to our work, we remember it. The trick is to recall it when we're about to hit that obnoxious little button ourselves.

Disciplinary-action threats aside, the State Department did the right thing when they called off the reply-to-all storm: They sent a good-old-fashioned cable to all of their diplomatic missions rather than compound the problem with yet another e-mail. Yes, it's 2009, and Morse code still comes to the rescue.

But the cable came with instructions to "please ensure widest distribution of this message," and one has to wonder how the diplomats handled that. Bullhorn? Sticky notes? A few hundred would-you-be-so-kind-as-to-refrain-from-any-further-stupidity phone calls?

Anything but a mass e-mail, just tempting someone to reply to all.