The “Reply-All” button is one of those things that if not used properly can create havoc and embarrassment of epic proportions.
We’ve all been there, responding to an email, hitting send then, oh shit, did I just hit Reply-All? Yes, yes you did. And in most cases there is nothing you can do about it. You just have to suck it up and just know that people out there in the world now think that you are a complete idiot.
Thankfully, at least I hope, none of us have ever failed as badly as these folks who answered Redditor SroDinger’s question, “Office workers of Reddit, what’s the most cringe-worthy “Reply All” you’ve seen?”
That being said, if you have done worse than than these, please do share with us in the comments. We promise not to make fun of you. Well, only a little bit.
Here we go…
Two of the partners at my old firm were having a not-very-discreet affair (both were married to other people). Partner A was in charge of the summer associate program, and sent an email around the firm with information on the summers — names, schools, etc. — who would be mentors for who, dates of events, etc.
Partner B replied all — to a 500+ person law firm, attorneys, paralegals, secretaries, everybody — “I’m going to pork you so hard later.”
It was hilarious for several reasons, including his ultra-seductive use of the word “pork.” ~ boobieaficionado
I was working in an office during the Iraq war and I get an email from some random private. “Yall motherfuckers need to shut the hell up!” Puzzled by such a blatant attack, I checked who this guy was and who he sent it to. I want to say he sent it to everyone in every command in Iraq, Afghanistan, and a few other places. Some say that private is still doing push-ups to this day. ~ saltnotsugar
Dude mass mailed one of those “Great American Gas Out” things to all 6,000+ employees. The CEO did a reply all saying something like “Exxon is one of our biggest clients and using company resources for your own political agenda is against company policy.” ~ diegojones4
About 12 years ago, I worked in a small office and a co-worker was telling a boring story to the whole office. My boss went to e-mail me to complain (I was his sounding board) but accidentally replied all to another company-wide email.
His message sent to the entire company? “I wish Donna would have emailed me this story so I could delete it.”
She saw the email a few minutes later, threw keyboard up in the air, grabbed her purse and ran out of the office. My boss had to profusely apologize the next day ~ HaveTilFive
I work for a United Technologies Company, so anyone familiar with the amount of companies that make up this group knows it’s a fuckton of employees. Just last week I received a strange email that had nothing to do with my job (calibration). I thought little of it other than maybe I was copied by accident. Well sure enough, random people from all walks of UTC started replying all with, “what is this about and why was I copied?”
This went on for hours, people hitting reply all on an email that turned out to be accidentally sent to a UTC email group of over 100,000 people. By the end people were shitting on each other for being another idiot hitting reply all, and flooding the servers. ~ beer_4_breakfast
I used to work at a law firm and one day an email went out to everyone (about 40 people) that was about a specific case and had very little relevance to my job position so I ignored it. A few minutes later I got another email from different attorney with a snarky response. Well an argument started between these two attorneys (still replying all to the office) and after about 6 or so emails a third attorney wrote “yeah well my dad can beat up your dad. By the way you have been sending this to the whole office.” ~ SarahKathrine
A co worker of mine was trying to motivate their sales office and was saying to get your hands dirty and if we had any difficulties closing a sale the girls should shake their little asses and close the sale.
Reached our CEO.
She wasnt there long. ~ Vargasa871
I was a temp in a very large law firm for a bit. One day, and new lawyer was hired, and HR sent out the standard email to everyone introducing the new guy and congratulating him on his new position.
New guy then replies all and asks the HR person if his benefits package pays for a hair transplant procedure. ~ LandOfNineteen
We had this guy from the main office, Pete, who comes up from time to time. He’s an arrogant asshole. I decided that I couldn’t stand that smug prick within literally 30 seconds of meeting him. Anyway, we had had quite a bit of turnover in our department since Pete’s last visit, so our boss wanted to schedule a lunch so he could meet everyone. So, his admin sent out a mass email to see who might be interested in lunch on Thursday. I replied back that I wouldn’t be coming because I had a conflict, and then I added, “Plus, Pete’s kind of a fuckwad.” I hadn’t realized that I had hit “Reply All,” until I heard the scattered laughter all over our floor. Our boss came over, invited me into a conference room, and said, “I’d appreciate it if in the future you’d let everyone decide on their own whether or not Pete is a fuckwad.” ~ kenaireb
The GM of my office was having issues with the sales team. He’s been known to go over board. This time, he hit reply all and called one of the sales guy a “Dirty fucking N–ger.” Needless to say once HR got a hold of the e-mail, is 27 year career was over. ~ Phiask0
Working in the claims department for a huge insurance company, one time a claim handler sent out very personal customer information to the ENTIRE company – every single employee including the CEO, security staff, building staff, even cleaning staff.
So, that’s bad enough.
But then we have this other guy decide to reply-all to that email, asking the other guy why he sent him this message – blissfully unaware that the first guy sent it to everyone in the company.
So now the first guy responds, still unaware of what happened, telling the second guy he has no idea how that email went to him.
So this email thread goes back and forth, reply-all, these two geniuses investigating wtf happened, for like 10 replies.
They finally decided it was a computer glitch.
Idk how they still have jobs.
I’d have fired them just for not knowing how reply-all worked. ~ alexisaacs
Had a management peer send out a long screed about the state of the men’s shitter on our floor. Very descriptive. Went out to all the men on the floor…and a whole bunch of customers. ~ porcinethunder
Just last week, an email was mistakenly sent to over 100,000 people in at least a dozen different countries. After about 45 minutes, there were a couple reply-all responses. A decent amount of people replied-all saying not to reply-all, but didn’t realize that the email server was backed up trying to send a few million emails. Some emails took over 10 hours from the time sent for me to receive them. This caused more people to say not to reply-all, as they hadn’t seen anyone else’s response saying so yet. Over the next 12 hours, I and every one of the other 100,000 people received over 180 emails, all having to do with wondering what the original email was, or telling us not to reply-all. Over 18 million emails in total.
A back-of-the-napkin estimation said it cost the companies tens of thousands of dollars.
EDIT: For those asking for my calculation. If all 100,000 people lost 5 minutes of working time to this mess, that is 500,000 minutes, which is 8333.33 (repeating, of course) man-hours. I’ll assume an average payment of $20 per hour per employee, which is likely a very low estimate. That’s over 166 thousand dollars lost. Keep in mind that while not everyone spent 5 minutes reading through and deleting the emails, there were also people like me who lost upwards of 5 to 6 hours due to waiting on emails to get me started on a new set of work. ~ Krohnos
This actually happened, I was in a group email thread regarding what everyone wanted to go grab for lunch. Someone recommended this place called “Persian Grill” which can accommodate many people. Someone in the thread posted “I’m down, haven’t had Persian Girl in a while”. ~ BillyBread
Someone at work sent an email asking for donations to his church. He sent it to over 2K employees. Then the chaos started. At first I could see my inbox rise in number 5, 10, 25, etc. Suddenly hundreds of emails poured in with some messages saying “i don’t want to donate and you should not send this email to everyone.” NO SHIT. I couldn’t decide who the biggest idiot was /were – the guy who sent the email or the assholes that replied all. The best email was from the IT director telling us not to “reply all” because the server was going to crash. And then it crashed.
I heard that the guy got fired (for soliciting donations – not emailing everyone) and IT got a slap on the hand for allowing everyone to have access to the “All employees” email group. ~ nickpar21
Not my office division, but our oil field / construction division sends in bids to secure future jobs. Lowest bidder wins. Winning a bid is sometimes scary, because you wonder if you left out any estimation tables.
Anyway. Our estimator sends in the bid to the proper email, which goes to a secretary. Other competitors use the same email address to send in their bids also.
Imagine our horror when the secretary sends a “Reply All” with a Thank you for submitting your bid for Project X. and all the other bids are attached to this email. So every competitor sees where each other are increasing estimations and decreasing their costs. It’s really both a TIFU and cringepost. ~ UnrulySupervisor
I work at a public institution. We send out term schedules to departments so chairs, deans, and administrative assistants can review and make necessary changes.
We had a chair reply back once the following:
I’ve made some changes to the schedule, can you rerun the report and send it to me for my dipshit former secretary?
This is with the dean, chairs of the other departments in that academic college, and administrative assistants of that academic college all copied in, including the “dipshit”. Apparently she was on her way to being terminated for some reason. She was gone pretty soon afterward.
We never heard back from anybody else in that department either so I am not sure what happened. The chair that sent the email remained at the university until he ended up dying from something unexpectedly a few years ago. ~ el_monstruo
Check out the rest of the cringe-worthy reply-alls over at Reddit.
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