Common mistake freezes the office
The work-day was half over today when half of my department (including me) learned we were on the hook for an all-day meeting tomorrow. There go our plans for the rest of the week; we have to do alternative planning to be out of the office tomorrow, and the alternative plans have to be wrapped up by close of business. One colleague had to scurry around to arrange alternative child care as well.The people running the all-day meeting knew about it three weeks in advance. So why, you may ask, did we learn so late? Here's the clue: the e-mail we got (I read it at lunch, only after hearing there was one) contained a "reminder" of the meeting. So... if we're "reminded" of a meeting we're hearing about for the first time, that is a sign that...
...the original e-mail was sent to the OTHER HALF of the department, which has gone through the meeting already, TWICE. And their two e-mails -- each identical -- included read receipts. Those read receipts should've been a sign that the sender made a mistake.
And it's a common mistake: the sender had two lists for the same message, and instead of sending it once to each list, she sent it twice to the same list. Why should the people who received the original message guess what's wrong? THEY were informed as they should be, though they were inconvenienced by extra read receipts. The sender made the mistake, and the read receipts should've tipped her off.
Funny, I mentioned that this mistake is common to one of my colleagues, and she looked at me like I was from Mars. Tough darts. It is. This is essentially no different than sending a message to an entire listserv, when it's intended as a response to one person. The colleague's counter-point? That even if any of us could do the same thing, the mistake still brings consequences. The one who made the mistake should be reprimanded. The reprimand didn't happen, but the sender of the undelivered message had to receive nasty return e-mails from several of those who were put out.
Entrepreneurs must be especially sensitive to this mistake, because we can't afford to inconvenience our first few customers with multiple repeated e-mails. They might even think of us as spammers if we're not careful.
Labels: internet, office space
posted by Ron @ 9:28 PM
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