When you accidentally hit ‘reply all’ and your hearts sinks

FOR these people, a seemingly innocuous click of the mouse nearly unravelled everything. Here are nine of the most cringe-worthy email reply-all mistakes ever.

Man getting mad and frustrated with his personal computer (pc). (THINKSTOCK)

IT’S a mistake that can be so easily made. Many of us have done it with varying degrees of severity, but accidentally hitting ‘reply all’ can have embarrassing consequences.

Here are nine of the most mortifying cases we’ve ever heard of. They’re sure to make you hesitate before hitting the ‘send’ button.

1. Flying into drama

An airline boss flew straight into the headlines in 2007 when he hit reply-all on an email intended only for his colleague regarding a disgruntled passenger. The Spirit Airlines CEO, Ben Baldanza response ended up being sent to the passenger as well, Fox News reported.

“Please respond, Pasquale, but we owe him nothing as far as I’m concerned,” the email read. “Let him tell the world how bad we are. He’s never flown before with us anyway and will be back when we save him a penny.”

Awkward!

YOUR SAY: Have you sent or received an accidental reply-all email? Tell us below

2. Offensive ‘joke’

UK Treasury press officer Robbie Browse made a public apology after his email fail in 2006, the Independent reported. The email, which made fun of the shape of Chinese people’s eyes, was intended for his group of friends. But he accidentally cc’d dozens of journalists, and one replied: “Will we all be invited to your leaving party?”

He wasn’t fired over the incident.

3. ‘Hi, sexy’

The cringe-worthy case of US financial worker Helen Georgaklis was detailed in the Wall Street Journal.

Georgaklis was on the receiving end of a rather inappropriate reply-all fail. She had been helping prospective clients from her church refinance their home, and when she introduced them to her colleague via a group email she received this response: “Thank you sexy Helen. I’m sure that all your male clients love working with you because you are so hot.”

4. Winners and losers

Another embarrassing tale from the Wall Street Journal involved advertising creative director Bill Cochran. His boss had sent an email to 200 employees containing a schedule of meetings where they would be required to present their work and compete for an agency job.

Cochran composed an email response to his boss where he critiqued his colleagues, picking the ones he thought would do well — and those who, ahem, wouldn’t. He hit send.

You can imaging his mortification when a colleague responded saying: “Oh God … Bill. You just hit REPLY ALL!”

So what did he do? He sent a second reply-all email apology, this time apologising to the group: “Sorry about that. I am going to go climb in a hole now.”

The slip of a finger can reveal so much.

5. Even the experts can stumble

Even the most tech-savvy of us have slipped up on the send button — just last year Microsoft executive Roy Levin accidentally sent the entire staff a response to CEO Steve Ballmer’s retirement announcement. Luckily it wasn’t particularly damning, but it sure was awkward.

It read: “Right. Maybe there’s a back story. The market likes the news, which is interesting, given that the successor isn’t known.”

6. The accidental outing

When tech publication Gizmodo went on a mission to unearth its readers’ worst ever reply-all stories this week, they were flooded with responses. One reader, and member of the LGBT community, accidentally came out of the closet at work via a ‘reply all’ accident.

“I was a member of a LGBT Chorus and on a committee,” they wrote. “I’d received an e-mail asking us all our feelings on a venue for the next performance. I read it in my work e-mail and hit ‘reply all’ with my thoughts.”

It just so happened that the chorus’s outbound distribution list was the CC to that e-mail. The first word of the list matched the worker’s company distribution list.

“So instead of everyone in the chorus getting my e-mail, everyone I worked with did,” they said.

However, besides sparking a good day’s worth of water-cooler gossip, everything was fine.

Bathroom dramas.

7. Plunger problems

The next example is even more bizarre, with a reader detailing their electronic-based faux-pas in an easy to follow play-by-play:

Step 1: Accidentally clog the office bathroom to the point of overflowing.

Step 2: Covertly sneak into other bathroom, retrieve plunger, and attempt crisis-control.

Step 3: Find that plunger requires insane amount of upper arm strength to be used properly. Shamefully visit HR rep and Accountant and plead for their help.

Step 4: Accountant fixes overflowing toilet.

Step 5: Email both HR rep and Accountant, briefly reverencing the incident and thanking them for their help.

Step 6: HR rep accidentally responds to that email by REPLYING ALL to a different thread, which included one of the highest managers at a VERY IMPORTANT COMPANY.

Step 7: HR rep calls me in a panic to apologise because now the VERY IMPORTANT MANAGER guy has to know about “the BATHROOM INCIDENT.”

Step 8: Concoct a less embarrassing version of events to tell him.

Step 9: DIE OF ULTIMATE SHAME.

8. Here’s nipple!

The internet is very familiar with stories of raunchy pictures ending up in unintended places. This is kind of like one of them. Working in an office job, this Gizmodo reader found “a funny picture of a guy in our program who was shirtless but was holding his hands in front of his chest.”

However as part of the man’s thumb happened to look like a different bit of anatomy, they proceeded to take a screenshot and e-mail the entire office with a subject line of “HERE”S NIPPLE!”

The real unfortunate thing was that he accidentally selected the global distribution list. “So every single person in the company (CEO and overseas workers included) got to see a lovely picture of a shirtless man presumably showing one of his nipples,” he wrote.

After a bit of damage control and spending the day terrified that he was going to lose his job, the worker got away with a stern talking to.