Oops! Thursday

Today's topic is e-mail. There are three major points: always proofread your e-mail content as well as your addressees; if your content might be perceived as controversial, save the e-mail as a draft and sit on it for an hour or so; and be quick on your feet to come up with a backup story, a plausible explanation for why you wrote what you did.

Case in point (names changed or disguised to protect the guilty): My friend Veronica's_Mother (VM) and I were working at a major arts organization in an Arizona city. VM was working for the executive director at the time, and had just sent out a very detailed, well-written, and triple-proofread e-mail to the board, with PDF'd documents attached for their review. One of the board members, who was a chronic PITA, responded to the e-mail asking how to open the attachments or some equally inane question. VM forwarded the note to me, the manager of information systems, for me to manipulate the attachment so the board member in question could download it. VM's written comment to me was "Some people can't read." Under pressure and in a rush, I neglected to delete VM's comment before sending the doc back to the board member. Oops!

Moments after hitting Send, I realized what I had done and went to talk to VM. We knew this PITA would communicate horrible things to the executive director about VM, possibly costing her that job, so we decided to peremptorily hit it hard. We decided that "Some people can't read" really meant "Some people can't read" really meant "Some people can't read the attached document." I dictated as VM quickly wrote another note to PITA, explaining that she realized what she wrote might be misinterpreted, and that she was asking me to fix the document so people could read it. She cleverly noted how the nature and use of e-mail has resulted in writers leaving out key nouns, clauses, subjects and objects.

VM received a kind note back from PITA, saying she was certain VM hadn't meant what the e-mail sounded like she meant. Whew! VM and I have laughed about this story over drinks for years. It's one of our many classic "I've got your back" stories.

And the moral of today's story: sometimes e-mails cause more problems than they fix. Be careful!