Awkward and Wrong: One reader’s workplace nightmare of CC’ing the guy she called dumb.

A couple of weeks ago, we asked readers to send us their tales of workplace Internet goofs—the sort of inadvertent reply-alls or Twitter overshares from your boss that can best be described as awkward and wrong. “Andi,” who is using a pseudonym to protect her job and the feelings of the people in the story, wrote in with a great story, and she is putting it out there to get conversation flowing. Add your own awkward and wrong workplace Google/Twitter/text sagas in the comments section below. Andi and the Double X staff will show up below and on Facebook to mix it up with you.

It was the end of a busy day, at the tail end of a busy project. I had three tasks to complete before I hustled to an all-staff "Show up or the state manager will notice your missing face!" meeting, and then headed off for the day. Partway through a final document review, an e-mail appeared CC'ing me on a communication from a colleague to a contact at another company.

This contact—let’s call him Mr. X, to protect the guilty—had become the bane of my life over the course of the project. His job was simple: All he had to do was read my weekly data requests and find the matching data in his company database so that when we tested our product, we would know if the answers we got from the system were right.

It should have been easy, but in three years I had never seen Mr. X get anything right on his first attempt, sometimes even on his seventh or eighth attempt. His inability to complete even the simplest task had forced me to redo hundreds of hours of work. He’d worn my usual cheerful nature down to a point where I wanted to hurdle the conference table and smash his face into a bloody pulp on his own notebook every time he raised his eyes during a “How could Mr. X have gotten this so wrong?” meeting with his company and claimed that once again he hadn't understood our request.

If I could go back in history, this is how I’d have handled it: I’d have read the e-mail, sighed, and dealt with it the next day when I was fresh. The unfortunate reality was that I read the e-mail, sighed, and rattled off a quick reply to my colleague warning her to check Mr. X’s work, with a note in brackets that to this day is burnt into my brain: "I know *sigh* dumb as a box of hammers." With scant concern I completed the rest of my tasks and went to the staff session.

When the meeting adjourned, I saw my project manager, who at that stage had only been with the company a week, bounding toward me. "Andi, Mr. X has been calling for you, he's rung quite a few times and he doesn't sound happy." My blood froze in my veins, my stomach became a knot that a boy scout would be proud of, and I felt like someone had punched me in the face. One thought burned in my brain: I couldn't have—could I?! Running to my desk with hands shaking so hard I could barely type in my password, I navigated to my sent items list and there, in all its glory, was the e-mail with a blazing CC to Mr. X informing him I thought he was as dumb as a box of hammers.

I freaked. I grabbed my project manager, showed her the e-mail, and she freaked. We rang my team leader who freaked a little less than we had, and then told me to ring the most pragmatic senior guy in our company and tell all. Fortunately I had worked extensively with this guy and he is to this day the most reasonable guy I have ever worked with. We rang him. He was very quiet for a long time and then he laughed, told me one day I, too, would laugh about this story—if in the meantime I didn't lose my job—and gave me a plan of attack. My saving grace was the missing word "he's." Had I said "I know *sigh* he's as dumb as a box of hammers," I would have been screwed. But if I claimed I meant I was as dumb as a box of hammers (because I should have told the girl to check the work when I assigned her the task or some such bullshit) … well, no one would believe it for a minute, but no one could prove it wasn't true, either.

So that's what we did—all the way to the upper echelons of Mr. X's company and back. I fronted to everyone from our state manager to the client account manager. By maintaining my story I saved my job, but of course lost some of my credibility. Small price to keep the job and protect my career!

Tags: awkward and wrong, workplace Internet goofs

Andi Harkness is an assumed name to allow the author to protect her job and the feelings of the people in the story.

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