EMAIL AND TEXTING GAFFES: FROM AMUSING TO CRINGE-WORTHY TO DISASTROUS
This month, an adulterous couple who work at Cornell University in New York, accidentally revealed their affair in graphic detail to the entire campus email distribution list. The email string involved is way too steamy to re-print, but a few highlighted words included: “spanking”, “trench coat”, “duct tape” and “my private porn star”. You get the picture. The unsurprising, extensive media coverage has awarded this the worst email gaffe in history – and I’d have to agree with them.
In this world of fast communications and email auto-completes, it is so easy to trigger that “Gasp!” moment’ after you’ve hit send. You know how it goes. You’re in a hurry. You fire off an email or hit reply to all and instantly, unintended recipients know how much you dislike your colleague’s cheap cologne, who earns more than you, or how much you fancy your boss!
Whatever it is, message gaffes are becoming more prevalent because it’s a law of averages. The more we text and email, the more chance we have of putting our foot in it. A survey by search engine Lycos estimates 42 email mistakes are made every minute in the UK. Of those, 60% sent an email to the wrong person, and 33% of the messages were steamy.
Here are a few other classic messaging mistakes that have made the rounds:
- In 2000, Devon schoolgirl, Claire McDonald, found herself receiving emails containing top secret information from the Pentagon after being accidentally added to a round robin list by a navy commander. One of them was offering advice to the UK on how to prevent secrets from being leaked.
- Headmaster Patrick Hazlewood and his school’s bursar, Barry Worth, jointly received an emailed complaint from local pensioner, Mary Kelly, about some misbehaviour by their pupils. “Tell her to get stuffed,” typed Hazlewood, thinking his response was only going to his colleague. Alas, he hit “Reply to All”.
- As the World Trade Centre crumbled on September 11, 2001, Transport Secretary, Stephen Byers’ special adviser, Jo Moore, emailed colleagues suggesting it was a good day to bury bad news. She had to apologise after the email became public and later lost her job over accusations she had made a similar recommendation for the day of Princess Margaret’s funeral.
- And finally, perhaps one of the most famous examples, is that of solicitor Bradley Chait who received an email from his girlfriend Claire Swire, fondly recounting a recently performed sex act. Recalling the conclusion, she wrote: “Yours was yum.” Chait proudly shared the email with some friends, who shared it with their friends, turning Claire into a global media sensation and watercooler talking point.
So a few words of advice:
- If you fancy the posterior of someone in the office, never put it in writing or text.
- Forget the Recall Email option. It never works.
- Finally, if you do want a good gasp or giggle, or a wake-up call to prevent making the same mistakes, check out http://www.textsfromlastnight.com/
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FREDDIE STAR ATE MY HAMSTER
Imagine if all of the world’s newspaper hacks abandoned their desks at the editorial office and just wrote blogs instead.
With the demise of the much loved The London Paper this month, and a rumoured closure for The Observer doing the rounds, this vision of the newspaper apocalypse is very much on our minds.
One question that plagued us was ‘would there be a drop in quality of the reporting of news without the hierarchal quality filters at papers’ as some protagonists predict? Did papers, with their ruthless and eagle-eyed editors really create top notch journalism, immune to the cheap wordplay and some of the ridiculous news you find on the web? Here are some highlights from UK papers that we love, and that tell a different tale.
LOL