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Humiliation lies an errant e-mail away

By WASHINGTON POST
Published December 17, 2006

WASHINGTON - One evening a few weeks ago, I was multitasking. Involved were a football game, a beer and simultaneous e-mail conversations with two people: my daughter and Garry Trudeau, the Doonesbury cartoonist.

You possibly know where this is going. In signing off with my daughter, I informed her, somewhat stiffly, that I'd get back to her soon with an answer. Trudeau received this: "Goodnight, Stinky."

As these things go, that was rather tame. Accidentally misdirected e-mails are legion, particularly in my line of work. Newsrooms tend to be places of unfettered communication among professional cynics, fault-finders, wise-asses and malcontents. When messages go astray, they are often highly amusing. So the stakes are high.

The most famous of these occurred at the Washington Post a few years ago. In an e-mail, Reporter A complained to Reporter B about how tough Editor Z had been on her story. Reporter A and Reporter B were cubs. Rookies. Green as an eyeshade. Wet behind the ears, like early Arkansas dew-kissed corn. When telling newsroom stories, it is important to use colorful cliches. Editor Z was a top cheese, a big kahuna, as crusty as a melanoma and twice as scary.

So, anyway, in a return e-mail, Reporter B tried to console Reporter A by informing her not to worry about big, bad, ol' Editor Z, who was, after all, an "ass."

Now, I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that Reporter B accidentally sent that message to Editor Z, right? That would have been real bad, but it is not what happened. No, Reporter B accidentally sent that message to EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE NEWSROOM.

For this column, I, too, sent an e-mail to everyone in the Post newsroom, asking people for their memories of accidentally misdirected e-mail. (And, yes, several people sent me back some variation of: "What a jerk that Weingarten is, getting us to do his work for him.")

One writer recalled receiving an e-mail apologizing to the wrong person for having "fallen asleep last night" at an apparently inopportune moment. Another writer got a message from a guy she barely knew informing her that she'd left some things at his house the previous night. When she dryly informed him that she'd never been to his house, he ran over to her cubicle and begged her to forget she'd ever heard from him.

Another colleague has a personal e-mail account name that includes the word "editrix." Apparently, there are other editor-women who have similar e-mail addresses, because occasionally she'll receive messages clearly intended for someone else. One of these misdirected e-mails came from a man slavering in anticipation over an upcoming assignation: "He was fantasizing about what I would be wearing, but not for long." When she e-mailed back to point out the error, the guy was chagrined and contrite, a condition that lasted for at least several minutes. Then he e-mailed her his picture, and asked for hers.

The dangers of e-mail errors in a newsroom are so great - and the risks so thrilling - that I once devised a game to take advantage of it. The game was called "E-mail Roulette." Here is how it is played:

There are two contestants. Each goes to the other's computer and types a particularly colorful, potentially career-ending e-mail message to the other guy's boss, all set up and ready for delivery. Then each party returns to his own desk. They take turns flipping quarters across the room toward the other guy's "Enter" key. It's a great game, but, for some reason, I never got anyone to play it with me.

My favorite e-mail story happened when I was an editor at the Miami Herald. I was sitting at my desk one day when a message flashed on my computer. It was from Richard Capen Jr., the publisher of the newspaper. Mr. Capen was a man of enormous dignity and stolid bearing, a man who would soon become the U.S. ambassador to Spain. The message from Richard Capen, on my computer screen, was a simple directive of the sort that one would not think of as ambassadorial. It is not publishable. It read, in its entirety: "(Verb) my (noun)."

Only later did I learn that Capen had been in his office talking to Dave Barry, and had momentarily stepped from the room, unwisely leaving his computer unattended.

[Last modified December 16, 2006, 20:33:36]