Author Bonnie Hearn Hill of Fresno was exchanging ideas via e-mail this summer with a friend writing a psychological thriller. The story involved a character’s murder.
“I think you need to kill him sooner, right off the bat,” wrote Hill. The friend didn’t reply.
She wrote again, supplying details about where and when the murder might take place. No response.
She tried again: “Let’s discuss this murder of yours over coffee.” Still, nothing.
Finally, Hill called her friend, who said he hadn’t received any of her e-mails — and by the way, uses his middle initial in his e-mail address. She’d been sending her homicidal messages to a stranger with a similar name.
Oops.
We rely so heavily on e-mail to communicate that it’s only a matter of time before most of us goof. The potential for unintended consequences is almost infinite.
Why? We like to gossip. We fall into routines without thinking. Worst of all, our fingers sometimes move faster than our brains. So we send the wrong message to the wrong person, send to a boss an unpolished e-mail instead of saving it or hit “reply all” instead of “reply.”
In the blink of an eye, more people than the entire population of Estonia know about your gout.
How do you fix it? Lisa Benenson, editor-in-chief of Hallmark Magazine, says there are a couple of ironclad rules. (The magazine’s September-October issue explored this subject.)
“Be prepared to own up to it if you mess up,” she says, and do so in person or on the phone, not simply by sending another e-mail.
Some people are so embarrassed about making such a mistake that they decide to ignore it and hope the recipients will do the same. Bad move.
“You are going to have to come away from your computer eventually,” Benenson says. “If you want to salvage the relationship, it’s really no different than if you had made the mistake in person. In person, you’re just called upon to fix it faster.”
Beyond that, what you should do depends on the scenario:
You hit “reply all” instead of “reply.” “If you haven’t said anything obnoxious, you’re fine,” Benenson says. But because a lot of gossip happens on e-mail, this mistake can be devastating. If you’ve insulted someone, “you’ve got to face the music,” she said.
If you realize your mistake immediately, send another e-mail to apologize. Start fresh, with a brand new e-mail, not a copy of the old one.
Besides an apology, the message should say that you will call or come by in person, depending on whether the person is in the next cubicle or the next town. Then follow through. Explain yourself, then beg for forgiveness.
You send instead of save an e-mail that isn’t ready. If you can quickly complete it as you’d hoped to send it, do so and put in the subject line “correct version,” so the recipients know which one to keep.
At the top, ask them to keep this version and briefly explain that you sent the earlier message too quickly.
A glitch sends an e-mail repeatedly to your address list. The most important thing is to stop the problem as quickly as possible. But in the meantime, Benenson said, “Unless it’s going to start going 97 times, send a note saying, ‘I am so sorry you’re getting these repeated e-mails. It’s a problem on my end. We’re working to fix it.'”
You inadvertently attach a personal file and send it to a co-worker. Unless you want everyone in the office to know what you’re doing about that gout, you stand up, walk over to the colleague and ask politely if he or she will delete it.
“You stand there and watch them delete it, and you ask them to empty their trash,” Benenson said. “If you can’t do that, this is a little sneaky, but I think [there’s] justification for this: You can say to them that it might have a virus, and they probably shouldn’t open it.”
You ask a friend not to forward any more inspirational hooey, and she’s offended. The best explanation is that your work e-mailbox has limited space, and that your boss doesn’t want you reading a lot of personal e-mails anyway.
You inadvertently e-mail a stranger. Hill says she “really expected police” to knock on her door after sending her errant messages about murder to someone she’d never met. She apologized to the other man with an e-mail and explained that she had been discussing a fictional murder.
Benenson says Hill did the right thing. But the author never heard back from the guy.
“Can’t say that I blame him,” she said. “He must’ve thought I was either murderous or crazy.”
