What Goes Around Can't Be Recalled

True story. One day, while at my previous job, the company CEO emailed everyone about a high-ranking officer being promoted to an even higher-ranking position. The email was a typical corporate sunshine pump, “We appreciate… tremendous… contribution… promote… Please welcome…”

In a short while, a much lower-ranking developer shot everyone the following email:

Gee, congrats! Can I have a raise now?

The guy desperately tried to recall the email twice, but it was tool late—it was already pumped into our inboxes. Finders keepers. To this day I don’t know if this dev got canned on the spot.

Any other stories from the field?

The owner of a company I used to work at got a call one day asking why a chain letter was accompanying a recent invoice. The accounts receivable person in charge of mailing the invoice had been including them in client invoices...

I think the most hilarious email debacles (happened three or four times) occurred while working at Dell Computer. Someone in HR would send some sort of official policy change email to the "All Dell" distribution list. The situation would begin to deteriorate when some poor misguided soul would reply-to-all with "Please remove me from the distribution list" not understanding that this was a corporate-wide email. So everyone in the company would get this remove-me request in their email box.

Things would then spiral downward as others, sometimes a dozen or so, people would ALSO request via reply-to-all "Please remove me too." "Me too." "Remove me too." Another dozen emails in my InBox.
Then things would get surreal as people would actually reply-to-all (Michael Dell reads his email folks -- or did at that time) shouting at the people requesting to be removed with comments like DON'T YOU IDIOTS REALIZE THAT THIS IS A CORPORATE-WIDE EMAIL AND YOU CANNOT BE REMOVED FROM ALL DELL!!!!! We'd get perhaps two or three of these.

But Wait! There's more! OTHER people would then reply-to-all re: the shouting emails with PLEASE DO NOT REPLY-TO-ALL TO ALL-DELL EMAILS!!!! EVERYONE IN THE COMPANY SEES YOUR RIDICULOUS COMMENTS!!! Again, two or three of these. Sometimes someone would reply-to-all chastising the person that wrote the do-not-reply-to-all email.

So somewhere between 15 and 20 emails would circulate to everyone in the whole company. Then, about three or four months later, a corporate email would go out, followed quickly by some new employee with "Please remove me from this distribution list"...

At some conference, IBM was showcasing their voice recognition system, and issuing voice commands on the command prompt of his laptop.

Someone from the first row shouted out "format c:"

Someone else shouted out "return; yes; return"...