My BAD/Funny Work Story

So sorry it's been so long since I've posted. I've just gotten super lazy, but I'm still chalk full of stories. To get back into the swing of things, here's what happened to a friend at work (I laughed for a good five minutes... very loudly I might add):



So today is my manager’s birthday and I brought her 2 huge cakes and random desserts since I am the only one in her group thus I felt it was my responsibility to treat her to something for her Bday. Anyhow, so she goes to a meeting and informs me to tell people to have cake at 2:30 pm. So I’m like cool, okay I’ll contact people to go to her office at 2.30 to have a mini cake celebration.

So I’m at my desk and I’m thinking, should I send it to just those few employees that are cool with her or the entire department? I decided to go for the latter because first of all, the cakes were huge, and second of all I didn’t want to leave anyone out. So I asked an admin assistant on how to send out emails to the dept and he told me to type in “ALL TETCO”. And I’m thinking.. hmm.. so I do this and I type “ Hey all, come to Andrea’s office for birthday cake at 2:30 pm!”

Little did I realize the email was actually sent out to the nationwide listserve of Duke energy, including Canada. Some small dinky email for some person’s birthday went company wide. Supposedly email sent out to the listserve are restricted to “Duke Energy Leaders” to inform employees of news about the company. So I’m literally thinking crap, but then I was hoping people would understand and just ignore the email. However, this was not the case, because I immediately got a call from HR Houston informing me of my intentions of the email and that I had made an accident.

Then came literally 50 emails from employees around the country who decided to “REPLY ALL” to my email. A lot of them were just “Did you mean to send this to all of Tetco?” or “ You might want to double check who you are sending to.” There were a few funny emails sent back to everyone that only annoyed the entire situation flooding everyone’s inboxes – like “WHOA that must be one BIG CAKE” and “I’m from Canada, so if you can provide me with a company jet I think I can get there in 4 hours.” Or “ Hey is there any cake left? Will it still be fresh when I get there?” and also “I dunno who you are or andrea is but happy birthday anyways.”

I mean for the most part they were humorous but the fact that they decided to reply ALL made the situation worse!! Eventually some top admin executive emailed everyone telling them to stop responding to the birthday email and then the exec wrote me a private email, CC’ed my manager, my soon to be new boss, and co-worker, saying that I should refrain from writing emails using that email address. Not only that the VP of my dept wrote an email telling people to stop replying etc.

Aside from emails – I got at least 20 calls – by the 3rd call I knew any call I got meant someone telling me what I did wrong. Someone said” You know I feel for you all these people making you feel bad.” And “ are you having a bad day yet?”

And here I am reading these emails and every extra reply all email that I got made me want to stab myself. I literally grew a zit from the stress. So HR made me write a correction email to the listserve again telling them of my mistake. I was also scared to face my manager when she got back from the meeting, but luckily she laughed it off and said it was hilarious and that people were being weird if they got mad about it. I was still kinda stressed about it cause it was just too much commotion caused within the company. Everyone was like GOOD ONE Latisha – but Im sure they were thinking “ whew glad I didn’t do that.”

So the birthday cake deal was good everyone came- it was like the biggest turnout for cake ever. And then I refused to go to cake cutting cuz I was still mortified. The emails eventually stopped coming but 2 good emails that made my day were the last 2 I received- I shall share with you:


Latisha,
To err is human. We all learn from our mistakes. Hope the birthday celebration went well.

Cheers,
Stella Freeman (Wang)

And :

Latisha,
What a great mistake. I bet she never got so many Happy Birthday’s in her career…….

So all in all I still consider today a bad day. It’s kind of funny though that some of the responses were from old folks. And I just got a call about 5 minutes ago from a guy from Ohio telling me that my email was cute and how it reminded him of someone who sent out a picture to the whole list serve and shut the entire system down. He said this occurred in year 1995.

Okay that is all – Im going to crawl into a big hole now.
Latisha.