This seems to be a true story. Source
In a previous job for a multinational, I found myself seconded to the States to help hand-hold the newly created US office through their incubation period.
Now whilst we were indeed a multinational, we were very much an old school organisation and privately owned by a rather senior establishment figure. When it came to the internets, we were pretty damn good (if i do say so myself), but this was very much the exception to the rule.
The IT department, unfortunately, were rather substandard – both in personnel and infrastructure. This wasn’t completely their fault and was mainly the result of a permanent lack of funding leading to some serious lowest common denominator teching. Whatever the reason, however, it wasn’t just confined to the UK – it was a worldwide problem.
This was the state of play then one summer Manhattan morning when I awoke. The sun was shining, the hobos were singing, all in all it seemed like a beautiful day. Little did I suspect what amusement the coming week had in store.
Leaving my apartment, I skipped merrily down the sidewalk to work, sharing happy grins and cheery “good mornings” with the other residents of the Big Apple remembering, as always, to be surly and grumpy around anyone who looked like a tourist just to make sure they had something to moan excitedly about when they returned to North Bumfuck, MA.
When I got into the office, however, all hell was breaking loose.
The cause?
A simple five word email.
You see, some poor underpaid secretary back in the UK had, on finishing her lunch, found that she had some fruit spare. Rather than see it go to waste, she helpfully put it in the kitchen of the floor she was in, and sent an email to everyone on her floor:
“Free bananas in the kitchen!!!”
Sadly, however (and yes – it’s obvious where this is going), she sent it to the wrong list.
It didn’t just go to her floor.
It didn’t just go to her office.
It didn’t just go to the UK offices.
It went GLOBAL.
What followed was the most ridiculous, slow motion email catastrophe I’ve ever seen.
First the UK replies streamed in – the standard emails that occur in this situation as already described by many posters above. The Out-of-Offices, the angry threats, the requests for removals, the threats to people requesting removals all – of course – fully utilising the “Reply All” and list functions.
Obviously the system collapsed and for hours the UK IT guys struggled to sort things out – everytime it came back up, email war would break out again and the situation would be repeated.
Finally, at about four in the afternoon, and thanks (I’m reliably informed) to the intervention of several members of the web team (who had been exchange administrators in a previous lives) they had just about managed to get things going again…
…just in time for the US IT guys to get THEIR servers working for the first time, at which point the flood of mails from US people demanding removal from lists etc. took everything down AGAIN.
This was to be the pattern for the next twenty eight hours or so. Thanks to a ridiculous lack of safeguards and indeed basic communication, every time one office somewhere in the world woke up, or managed to get a server back up it would kick off the whole email war anew and everything, everywhere would die a fiery electronic death.
For three whole days Senior Managers the world over were howling at people to stop sending emails (after about the second day they seemed to cotton on to the fact that doing this by EMAIL probably wasn’t helping), IT departments the world over were howling in pain and frantically trying to sort things out and general users were engaging in an email war of global scale, with angry individuals flinging racially dubious emails across nations at each other to the horror of HR departments everywhere.
Finally, finally on the evening of the third day the crisis started to pass.
Workers the world over breathed a sigh of relief and newly calm managers and techies from across the globe sat down together to try and heal their wounds and come up with policies to prevent it from happening again – a kind of Corporate version of Versailles.
By day four, policies had been written and technical plans made, which they would begin implementing on day five. This would not happen again – the world would be saved and civilization would reign once more! “Peace in Our Time!” the newly created Head of Global IT proclaimed, waving a copy of Exchange Server For Dummies enthusiastically above his head…
…as at the same time, in his palatial office in the Headquarters back in the UK, the CEO (the rather old school UK establishment figure who will go unnamed) decided that what everyone needed after recent events was a little joke. Nothing fancy – just something to make everyone chuckle and break the tension caused by the previous few days.
Sitting down to his desk, he casually opened up his email and, chuckling at his own brilliance, typed five, simple words…
“Who ate the bananas then?!”
…and clicked “Reply All”
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What you see is what to be said an entry level test leaked from Russian army. If the soldier can’t see the number in one of the 6 circles on the test picture, the he likely might having:
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