PLEASE DON'T DELETE

A pretty funny thing happened in my office Friday.

No, nobody got drunk at a Christmas party and Xeroxed their privates. I don’t work in that kind of place, sadly.

What happened was, some moron came across one of those chain e-mails. This one has been around for a long time, claiming that for every person you forward it to, Microsoft and AOL will send you money. Now, anybody with even one operable brain cell realizes this is a scam. It has been around for more than 10 years . Even Florida fans don’t fall for this one.

And yet, sure enough, this idiot figures, hey, what the heck? What can it hurt just to forward an e-mail? Maybe I really can get rich this way. After all, it says right there in the e-mail, “This really works.”

So, he forwards the e-mail along. Not to a few friends and family and co-workers. Oh, no. He apparently sent it to every employee in my company. That’s more than 20,000 people.

OK, that was dumb enough, but not that big of a deal. Everybody just had to delete his stupid e-mail and move on, right? But oh, no, nothing is that simple. Instead, his e-mail begat a flood of stupidity that kept some of us entertained all day long.

If you work in a company of any size, then you’ve had to deal with people who don’t understand how to use the “reply to all” feature. You know, somebody will send an e-mail to a large group about something, and somebody will send back what they think is a witty reply, but they send it to the whole group, and somebody else joins in, and before you know it there are 50 pointless e-mails in your inbox. This should be a death penalty offense.

So when an e-mail goes to 20,000 people, it’s really a bad idea to “reply to all.” But that didn’t stop folks at my company. At first, three or four people wrote to let us all know that this e-mail was a hoax, don’t fall for it. Really? What are you going to tell me next? There’s no Easter Bunny?

Then, there began a spate of people who were so irritated that people were replying to all, that they were moved to reply to all, saying “please stop replying to all.” Some were kind of nasty about it – “STOP WASTING MY TIME.” Some replied to all, threatening to report those people who were replying to all. One guy wrote 3 or 4 sentences detailing how he was too busy and had too much to do to be deleting these e-mails, so stop sending them. I figured you could delete 5,000 e-mails in the time it took him to write that.

It finally slowed down a little bit. Our IT department had to send out an e-mail that told everyone to never forward an e-mail like that to the WHOLE FREAKING COMPANY (I paraphrased that a bit), and to please stop replying to all. But a few people kept doing it anyway.

The funny thing is, it happened on a Friday afternoon just before Christmas week, and a lot of people weren’t even at work. Some won’t even be back until after the New Year. Imagine the surprises their in-boxes are going to hold.

Did I mention the guy sent the initial e-mail to every single executive in the company as well, including the CEO? I don’t know what’s going to happen to him, but perhaps he should be hoping Santa brings him a new job this Christmas.