I sent a rude e-mail to an unintended recipient and lived to tell the tale
I sent an e-mail the other day. I know, how is this news? Well, it isn’t, but what followed is something we’ve all experienced.
As soon as I hit send, a thousand pangs of regret hit me in the pit of my stomach. Actually, that’s a gross understatement. I felt like someone punched me in the ovaries and guess what? I would have deserved it.
The e-mail in question was directed to my equally surly friend. In a not-so-eloquent way (read: rude and disparaging), I discussed an event I was attending that night. I may have mentioned I was only going for the free swag and those cute little hors d'oeuvres. I may also have mentioned that I wanted to be in and out quickly so I could go next door and eat fish tacos, which seemed like an infinitely better option.
I hastily hit send and realized immediately that it went to the one person who should not have been on the receiving end. I sent it to the person who invited me and who also happens to be the president of the company throwing the event.
OK, so as we collectively cringe at my indiscretion, I assure you that life does indeed go on after you commit a misstep as epic as this one.
Most of us have been there. In a world where we’re communicating all the time, there’s bound to be one (or five) incidents where conversations with friends end up in the wrong inboxes.
I had a few thoughts post incident after having a full body meltdown on how to handle such a situation.
Yes, you need to apologize
For a split second, I thought about just pretending it didn’t happen. She probably gets so many e-mails! Maybe she didn’t even read mine. Wrong.
Unless the person is the customer service department at Rogers, she/he came across your unintended e-mail and read each and every rude word of your inappropriate diatribe. As painful as it may be, acknowledging what you said is usually the appropriate course of action. It might not seem genuine because you only apologized because you got caught, but their respect barometer for you will go up a notch or two just because you took responsibility for being a total knob.
The one time I’d go against this advice is if what you wrote isn’t all that bad or could be construed as a clear joke. You might do well to ignore it rather than draw attention by sending a grovelling apology. Use your better judgement but sometimes, the person on the receiving end just chuckled and deleted it.
Double check who you’re e-mailing and texting
This is the first thing you promise yourself after you’ve made such a mistake, but you should also be careful when doing other e-mail-related functions like BCCing or forwarding.
Make this a long-term promise, not something you do for two weeks and immediately fall back into your old careless messaging pattern.
Mitigate
The first line of defense is creating a delay when sending e-mails so you have a few seconds to fix your egregious error. Gmail allows you to set up a 30 second delay before you’re committed to that e-mail.
For SMS situations, a little trick I discovered is putting your phone on airplane mode if you realize quickly enough that you’ve sent the wrong message. Once you turn airplane mode off, you’ll notice your message has failed to deliver.
Facebook: This is one precaution I took before this incident. My privacy settings are configured so everything I post is private (only visible to me) initially. If everything looks okay, I’ll set the post to public or just make it visible to my friends.
Know that everyone’s been there
You’re not the spawn of Satan because you said something rude or uncalled for. More people than you realize have been in the same undesirable situation. In fact, some people can probably attest to being on both ends of the spectrum.
As I retold this harrowing tale to my friends, almost everyone I spoke to could relate. I’m not saying don’t feel bad, I’m saying don’t send yourself into a tailspin unless you just told your entire company to f— off.
Keep it to yourself
Being eternally optimistic isn’t an option for everyone. I, of all people know this. However, there are instances where I catch myself spewing unnecessary verbal diarrhea that didn’t need to be said in the first place. I did it out of boredom or I was having a bad day, which can lead to incidents like the above.
If you didn’t say it, you’ll never have to take it back. Am I right?!
Perspective is everything
Contrary to how you feel at the moment, regressing into fetal position isn’t the ideal reaction. People get over things and you should too.
If you didn’t just cause the entire world to implode with your e-mail, try to see how your silly note is not as monumental as you think. You might have hurt some feelings but if you handled the situation correctly, that’s all it will ever be - a few hurt feelings.
