Mass emails are a highly efficient way to communicate information among your peers. Putting your whole group on the same page – literally – eliminates unnecessary back-and-forth emails, and it makes for increased productivity and an overall unified purpose among your group.
Emails sent out to entire departments or companies are thoroughly proofread and heavily scrutinized. But, inevitably a few mistakes make it through the error-checking process, and once in a great while, that error can turn a productive, purposeful message into a confusing (and sometimes comical) blunder.
A powerful storm recently wiped the power out for the entire office building at my workplace. All employees received the following message:
The power is currently out in our office building. The elevators are not working, access to the network is down and the phones are nonfunctional.
We are sorry for any incontinence and will send updates as they become available.
Please reply to this email if you have any questions.
Thank you.
Administration
(“Inconvenience” was the intended word, but the iPhone’s nifty predictive text feature felt that a slightly different word suited the purpose better. Perhaps “incompetence” would have also worked!)
Needless to say, there were quite a few followup questions, and confusion instead of clarity. We did, however, see the humor in it; a day off from work is certainly cause for excitement, but I doubt anyone got that excited.
Do you recall any memorable email mistakes? Have you ever mistakenly send a glaring error out to a large group of coworkers?