It’s something all of us dread. Making a error of judgement in a professional email can be potentially fatal to your career. The best policy is, of course, to take care not to write anything inappropriate and think carefully about you will get to see your message.
If that sounds like a tough resolution to stick to, these disaster stories should inspire you to stay in line:
1) Richard Phillips
The thing about email is, once you’ve made a comment, it’s in the hands of the recipient to do with what they will. Now, when you say something a bit scathing about someone, surely the last thing you want to do is give them a permanent copy of the statement that they can then pass to all their friends?
Richard Phillips learnt this the hard way. As the senior associate of the world’s biggest law firm, Phillips was, as you can imagine, not short on money. Therefore, when his secretary accidentally spilt ketchup on his suit, she was taken a back when she received an email demanding she pay him back for the miserly amount he’d have to shell out on dry cleaning, especially as she’d only just returned to work following her mother’s death.
In response, she sent his email on to many of his business partners, lawyers and trainees in the firm, sarcastically suggesting they have a collection for the money. The email was forwarded throughout the business world and Richard was left with his reputation in tatters.
2)Patrick Hazelwood
As the principal of a school, Mr Hazelwood was doubtless a role model to hundreds of children… Right up until his shaky grasp of the distinction between ‘reply’ and ‘reply all’ landed him in hot water with his local community.
Having received an email complaint form an elderly member of the public regarding the extra curricular antics of some of the boys attending the school, one of Mr Hazelwood’s colleagues forwarded it to him for his attention. His response was short, to the point and highly unprofessional: “Tell her to get stuffed.”
This would’ve been an eyebrow raiser even if he’d only sent it to his fellow member of staff. Unfortunately he also sent it to the woman in question, who was left complaining about a lot more than just the school’s children…
3)Claire McDonald
Claire McDonald, is on the list, not for sending an inappropriate emails, but instead for being on the receiving end of them. Somehow the schoolgirl’s email address found its way onto a secret military round robin list, apparently after being added by a US naval commander who had made a very unlucky typing error.
Having been added to the list, Claire received a spate of missives containing top secret information from a wide number of organizations, including the Pentagon and the British Ministry of Defense.
In fact, she received so many sensitive files, it actually caused her computer to crash, despite her repeatedly sending messages to try and alert the senders to their mistake. Makes you wonder why computer hackers go to all that effort…
4)Sarah Bell
A bad email can cost you your job, but if you’re a firm looking to hire, it can also cost you a potential employee.
When bi-lingual Sarah Bell applied for a job at a company providing English/Mandarin translation services to a top Chinese university, she naturally assumed her bosses would be fluent in both languages. The following emails were enough to persuade her to ignore the job offer and send her CV elsewhere;
1)
Hi…..,
Currently, we have a website translation project of a famous China university.
Due to the relatively low difficulty level of the translation, the starting rate for all translators is 2cents/charactor. Hight [sic] rate is available for academic papers, suhc [sic] as Chinese literature, poem and so on.
If you are interested in it, our project manager will contact you soon.
Best,
……
2)
Hi….,
Welcome to work on the project, hope we can cooperate well and make the project progress smoothly.
Attached is the first task for you. Our project is on a quite tight schedule. If you are interested in working on this task, please check and confirm with me whether you can finish this on within two to three days with your best quality.
Please send back an email to confirm no matter you accept this task or not.
Thanks.
Best,
Not exactly “best quality”, right?…
5)John and Lisa, Cornell University
This incident has now entered internet folklore as one of the worst ever instances of accidentally copying the wrong people into an email.
John and Lisa who were both working at the university, where enjoying an illicit affair with each other (both being married to other people) and enjoyed using their email accounts to send sexually suggestive and teasing messages to each other.
They were managing to hide their misdeeds from the world pretty effectively until, John, who ironically enough, was there as a tech consultant, inadvertently managed to find a way of copying the entire campus (and anyone they cared to forward it on to) into a very long, very steamy thread.
Joseph Helter writes on all sorts of employment issues for www.job-centre-vacancies.co.uk
