Hydrogen and Stupidity
February 13th, 2008 by Dave
We had a little episode of insanity at my workplace yesterday. Mind you, this is a large company (over 100,000 employees), so insanity is probably more prevalent here than in other places. For obvious reasons, the identity of my employer shall not be revealed here.
It all began when someone sent an email regarding the status of one of our HR systems to the wrong email distribution list. Unfortunately, the distribution list that was chosen was a large one, and the contents of the email didn’t pertain to the vast majority of its recipients. My coworkers and I were among those recipients, of course. Those of you who work in the corporate world (i.e. Dilbert’s World) can probably guess what happened next.
Some of the unintended recipients began replying to this email by pointing out that it didn’t pertain to them, and asking why they received it. Of course, many of those individuals chose “Reply to All”, and then everyone who received the original email by mistake also received the “why me?” replies.
All the people now getting the replies are thinking, “Boy, those people who hit ‘Reply to All’ are really stupid. Don’t they know better?” And some of these people chose to let those people know it by (you guessed it) Replying to All. And this, of course, caused even more people to Reply to All, simply to say, “Stop Replying to All!”
A couple hundred of these Replies to All, multiplied by (I’m guessing) a few thousand recipient, makes for a lot of email flying around the ol’ corporate email servers, wasting a lot of resources. Finally, someone from corporate broadcast a cease and desist order, and it appears that our corporate IT department was somehow able to shut down the problem.
As we sat in a staff meeting yesterday morning, my coworkers and I chuckled at the mass insanity evidenced by these email shenanigans. One of my coworkers reminded us of one of those fake motivational posters you see every so often–the one that said:
None of us is as dumb as all of us.
Need I say more?
Oh, you’re probably wondering why the title of this post is Hydrogen and Stupidity. The title is actually part of one of my favorite quotes, some variation of which is attributable (I think) to Frank Zappa:
The two most abundant elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
Got any favorite quotes like this? Leave a comment below and share them with me!
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