Dividing by Zero

More than once, I’ve seen where somebody hit “Reply-to-All” when responding to a company-wide email. I’ve seen people follow-up by using “Reply-to-All” to tell people not to use “Reply-to-All.” And just once, about five years ago, I’ve seen that escalate to three or four levels of people saying “You idiot! Don’t use Reply-to-All.”

I’m not sure how much coverage the news story got outside the DC area, but back in January, employees of the US State Department managed to cripple their own email system by hitting “Reply-to-All.”

Gene Weingarten’s matter-of-fact reporting of that event has to be the funniest thing I’ve read in quite a while.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 at 9:40 pm and is filed under Silliness, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.