Working in a ghost office and an e-spam incident from Tuesday

Today I had to work. It is not a Federal Holiday and I refuse to take a personal day to shop on the day after Thanksgiving. So I was one of about 6 people in my office. I had high hopes of accomplishing lots but in reality did not do so. I have a presentation to give on Monday but did not get much of it done. I also have several template letters I need to complete for a conference I am co-organizing next September, but again I did not get much of this done either.

Throughout the day I kept waiting for something exciting to happen. For example, a few days ago a "random" subset of the organization I work for (~1000 people) were sent an e-mail providing an update about some new initiative (think Dilbert initiatives!). There was no preamble to this message and it was not very clear the goal of the commication. I noticed my husband was on the e-list so I quickly e-mailed him predicting that an e-uproar would occur. Within 15 minutes of recieving the initial e-mail someone used the "reply to all" feature and suggested the e-mail was not appropriate for them. Pretty soon, there were about 20 more e-mails using the reply to all suggesting the e-mail was not appropriate to them.

I sent Tristan an e-mail predicting someone would request people stop using reply to all in suggesting the intial e-mail was incorrect. Soon enough there was a response requesting others not reply to all. A string of about 25 e-mails asking for others to stop using "reply to all" then ensued. It was getting out of hand! Then two people asked to be kept on the e-list because

Person 1: was lonely and liked e-mail
Person 2: wanted to be kept in the loop

Person 2 was e-attacked for trying to stay in the loop (Person 1 was not but Tristan thinks this person was being sarcastic). Then there were responses to these responses

So for those of you keeping track there were 30 e-mails suggesting the person is not appropriate for the first e-mail, then there are 25 e-mails requesting others not reply to all, then there is new demographic complaining about the folks who are replying to all asking others not to reply to all. There were about 10 e-mails to this effect. By the end of the day, there were over 100 e-mails related to this.

This went on for 3 hours!!!

It cracked me up. Sadly I think I lost every bet I made against Tristan related to this escalating nonsense. He expected people to respond quicker and more frequently and he did not even have to enter the fray to ensure his numbers were met!