Reply To All: Making people dumber since 1971

About a month ago, an e-mail was sent out to my entire division by mistake.  It should have gone out to people working on a certain project or something (I honestly don't know because I never bothered to read or look into the original message because I knew it didn't pertain to me), but instead it was accidentally sent to the Outlook directory for the whole division.  Ok, a mistake, no big deal.  Then, people got stupid.

A couple people decided that they wanted to tell THE ENTIRE DIVISION that they did not think the e-mail should have been sent to them.  Then it spread.  And spread.  And spread some more.  In a matter of about a half hour, my esteemed colleagues were clicking on Reply To All and telling the whole world they should not have received this e-mail (join the club idiots, nobody cares about what you think).  Some of my even more esteemed colleagues then scolded those replying to all by doing, you guessed it, REPLYING TO ALL!!!!  It was a classic case of do as I say, not as I do.  As we've learned over time, that is a terrible way to go through life.

Since I get bored with my work from time to time and was immensely entertained by this, I decided to create a couple rules in Outlook to see how many decided to use Reply To All on this particular morning.  The final count was 72 e-mails, about 90% of which came in a 20-minute span.  It was a near 50/50 split between those replying to all saying they should not have received the message and those replying to all scolding the others who were replying to all.

So kids, don't be stupid, don't reply to all.  People will either make fun of you (me), want to cause you physical harm (there were some veiled threats in the scolding e-mails), or simply lose respect for you (me, as well as most of my co-workers in my office).

Interestingly enough, nobody in my office took part in the Reply To All madness.  Honestly, I think it is because we still enjoy hanging on to our small, independent company mentality we all learned while working for HR XCEL before getting acquired.  You had a face at HR XCEL and couldn't just blend in as one of 45,000 names.  If you did something stupid like hit Reply To All and sent a stupid response like, "I shouldn't be on this e-mail..." you looked stupid because chances are you were supposed to be on the e-mail and everybody knew everybody in a small place so you can't be a faceless name behind a terrible e-mail message.