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Another funny incident. A colleague of mine received an inquiry from a customer who was truly a nutjob. He thought he had forwarded his inquiry to me and wrote something like “This guy is a total whack job”. He mistakenly hit the reply key however.
The customer was not pleased, and my office had to issue an apology.
Once, in the early days of office email in teh last millenium, someone in our managing clerk’s office unfortunately created an out-of-the-office rule with a vacation notice and set it to “reply to all.” Crashed the whole system, as the auto-reply would hit other auto-replies creating multiple, never ending loops of replies. Everyone started getting his message about 5-6 times a minute. Like firing a laser into a house of mirrors.
Of course, he eventually returned and had to spend weeks answering “how was your vacation?”
Key rules for conference calls is, if you are going to be late joining one, never announce your name, just hit the pound sign two times quickly. Then if someone asks who just joined, don’t say a word. Or else say the name of someone in the office whom you can’t stand.
There used to be a Cuban guy in the sugar industry who was a famous and large seller of sugar who used to write a commentary for his large number of customers. Apparantly he wrote a funny and skewering email detailing all the antics, tricks, and shenanigans by same said customers at a weekly buying tender, which was supposed to go to a colleague, but by mistake was sent it out to the client list. It became a kind of status symbol to have received that email and people framed them and hung them in their offices.
OH people in my office use “reply all” all the time for funny nonsense and cc: the whole company. Now THAT’S embarrasing.
Funniest conference call I was ever on was during a negotiation with a supplier. There were about 5 guys on our side, and the same on theirs. It was a long teleconference, and we decided to take a 10 minute break. The opposing side thought that they had put their speakerphone on mute during the break, but did not. During the break, they talked about the negotiation and the cards they felt they were holding, and what they thought of each of us on our side. We enjoyed it. When the negotiations resumed, we never let on that we were privy to their discussion but clearly we had gaind the upper hand.
A majority of my work day is spent on conference calls. I don’t think I ever did anything too bad on one, although I did have one bad “reply to all” incident caused by drinking while using my blackberry.
CG – 12:54 – dibs calls it an energy bar.
Oh Cgar, you’re a total drama queens. I had much worse situation when talking crap about people who are one the call to someone else and forgetting to press the MUTE button or thinking I pressed it and didn’t. Come on now, announcing that you are late will get a few chuckles but that’s about it.