Stupid people, stupid petitions

[plonq]

A well-meaning but stupid person in one of our branch offices sent out a petition to everybody in the company this morning. It is one of those "sign this and the government will change its policies" petitions that has no effect other than to fill in-boxes and clog up mail servers.

Statement of likelihood: In a company of this size, it is not unreasonable to posit that the percentage of stupid people working here mirrors the percentage of stupid people in the general population.

Things like this tend to bring them out of the woodwork. People have been giving their "Reply to All" buttons a workout this morning, quoting the message in its (rather lengthy) entirety so that they can say, "Please remove my name from your email list. Tks"

>.<

...and there's another.
...and another.

Comments

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Once Upon a Time, in the Magical Faraway Land of Microsoft... wait, I can do better than that: I have the T-shirt. ;)

The day: October 14th, 1997.
The mailing list: Bedlam DL3.
The setup: New employees to Microsoft are set up with internal email accounts which are auto-subscribed to any number of mailing lists, many of which are unused and inexplicable. This particular list, Bedlam DL3, is one that for some reason employees from all over the world were auto-subscibed to.
The message: "... I see that I'm a member of this alias. I never subscribed to it, and would like to know: a) am I supposed to be on it? b) what is it?"
The result: The message went out at around 9 am; by 1 pm, Microsoft's mail servers shut down from the avalanche of "Reply To All" comments, many of which said "STOP REPLYING TO ALL DAMMIT." Good thing it happened on a Friday; over the weekend, somebody waded in there with a shovel, cleared out the server, then changed the list (and several other huge-distribution-lists) to only accept replies from moderators or somesuch.

Me: ROFL! And a week later, I got a t-shirt to commemorate the event. ;)

[typographer.livejournal.com]

I didn't get a t-shirt for mine. It was 1994, I don't recall the date more precisely.

Somehow a list I was subscribed to got itself subscribed to a list of AFL-CIO local chapter officers. And someone posted a petition to the union list, which wound up on our not-at-all-related list. Before we realized what was happening, several people had replied, thinking that they were only replying to our little not-at-all-related list, but of course going to the union list which had tens of thousands of members. "This is not appropriate for this list" and so forth.

Then the "Please remove my name from this list" messages started... and the "Please don't 'Reply to All'" messages started, followed by the thousands (of truthful) "I didn't click 'Reply to All,' I simply clicked 'Reply'" and so on.

And yes, quoting the original message, and quoting the quotes of messages, and so on.

By the third day the "Why are all you people flooding my inbox?" messages outnumbered the others about ten-to-one.

I was still a quasi-member of our company's IT team at the time, and I had to help our e-mail admin track down people responsible for the server that was hosting the big list (located in Newark, as I recall)--which was apparently a brand spanking new list, created by someone on his last day before a four-week vacation.

I would have liked to see what conversations transpired with his co-workers when he got back...