Reply All

I decided to take an actual lunch break today. It was so nice to take a full hour to myself. When I returned to my computer, I was appalled to see that I had gotten over 200 emails. Something was very wrong! I am not that important to be getting that many emails in that short span of time. 

It seems that there was some kind of bug that had generated all these emails from a number of distribution lists. What made the whole situation worse was that people replied all to the original emails and then to each of the responses. I am hoping that because it was Friday there was some kind of lapse in reasoning but I sincerely doubt it. 

I selected all of the emails I received and deleted them. The subject line made no sense to me. The other recipients were not people with whom I was remotely familiar and if it really is important, I’m sure someone will forward them to me at a later point in time.

There is this weird belief in corporate situations that reply all is a good thing to use. I am not sure who told people that or where they got this idea. Perhaps it is some kind of practical joke but it’s not funny. It’s really annoying. And what is even sadder than the fact that people reply all is that by the end of the day an email was sent out from the director of our area telling people to stop replying all. Did we really need that? Sigh! I guess people just don’t have enough to do at work. I’ll gladly delegate some of my stuff. I’m sure no one would even respond to that email.