NHS wail about email fail

“Set up a distribution list!” they say. “It’ll make life easier”. Good idea – unfortunately, someone at the NHS managed to send an email to 840,000 colleagues…

Ever prepare a carefully worded email, hit ‘send’ and then wondered if you included all the people you intended in the ‘To’ field? Never mind – you can always forward in on to anyone missing with an apologetic “Sorry!” at the top and a smiley face to prove you’re a good sort really and it was a genuine mistake.

Better than doing it the other way round, and including someone you didn’t mean to. What if it was irrelevant to the recipient? Embarrassing. What if it was highly relevant? “Peter is the single worst employee we have, and his shirts give me a headache. Surely that’s grounds for dismissal?” and you sent it to me… sorry, him? Devastating. (Especially as they’re nice shirts really.)

Most of the time, it’s just great entertainment value. You get to see all sorts of interesting stuff when people unintentionally reply to a company-wide memo, airing their grievances with every single colleague.

It’s far more efficient and instant than if they stood up in the middle of the office and shouted “Fundraising for poorly kittens is a complete waste of time and I did NOT eat that yoghurt in the staff fridge!” Someone could be in a meeting and miss that. Or surreptitiously eating a yoghurt in the stationery cupboard.

Or there’s that delicious moment when a lengthy email chain reveals that someone recently copied in was criticised a month ago. They’re only just getting to see it because the sender didn’t read all the way down. Ooo! Feel the quality of that social awkwardness.

Then there’s the epic tension when you send an email to the wrong people and try to recall it. Will it have deleted it from their inbox? Does that even work? How long have I got to put my stuff in a box and move to another country?

All of that pales into insignificance when you think about the poor NHS employee whose distribution list went rogue and sent their dull message to 840,000 colleagues.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, hundreds of dim-witted recipients then replied pointing out the error or asking to be removed from the list… but sent that to all original recipients too. These people are responsible for looking after our health – alarmed yet?

Unsurprisingly, the sheer overwhelming weight of dullness melted the email system, causing further problems and lost hours whilst people attempted to delete all the unwanted messages. The unwitting sender was effectively an email patient zero, unintentionally infecting hundreds of thousands of others with a swollen InBox, headaches, and a nagging sense of despair.

Not their fault, apparently, but everyone affected can be comforted by the fact that they’ll still be deleting ‘out of office’ messages on Christmas morning. Let’s just hope they didn’t request notification when the message was delivered. Got to go – just had an email arrive…

This post first appeared as my 'Thank grumpy it's Friday' column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 18th of November 2016. The print version re-named it as "Emails can be dangerous", whilst the version on their website got "Sending emails is fraught with danger".

If only I got paid for three columns. Actually - I don't get paid for any columns. This writing thing clearly isn't going to get me rich any time soon...

Following my update t'other day about the unprecedented level of views of my column reviewing BBC3's "Class", that column also got a very large number of hits, jumping it up to the 3rd most viewed column ever. I'm therefore assuming that, by mentioning it again here, this one will also go large. I may have found my route to fame. f only I'd have know it was that easy, I wouldn't have spent the last 40+ years mucking about being all earnest.

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