"When I make a mistake," legendary New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia said famousely, "it's a beaut." LaGuardia would have been ROFLHAO at today's cyberworld, where to err is only too human but to forgive depends on how tolerant are those you inadvertently share your cybermistakes with.
One worker opens a client e-mail with a topless photo...intended for the client's significant other, not him. Another sees business plans that were never meant for her eyes at all. Yet another was dumb enough to solicit group sex on his office computer - and inadvertently included three of his biggest clients in one week's mailing, costing him his job and his firm at least one of those customers.
Welcome to a side of cyberspace you probably all know but half the time are too sheepish to acknowledge: you're so only human that you've probably sent the wrong messages to the wrong people or received the wrong messages from the wrong people, sometimes to your amusement, sometimes to your chagrin, and once in awhile to your professional or personal doom.
Conqwest CEO Michelle Drolet told Wired she's often shocked by the way people forget simple professionalism when messaging electronically. "E-mail is amazing," she told the magazine. "People write nasty letters and do things they would never do in real life."
And Peter Shankman - who got the aforementioned wrong topless photo from the wrong woman - told the magazine he once got another e-mail from another client that had even crazier repercussions: it was a diatribe against a journalist...which the client accidentally copied to that journalist, telling him he "wouldn't know how to review a piece of software if I came over and shoved it up his bony ass." .
It's one thing to have e-mail archives resurrected when it comes to litigation - as Microsoft, Merrill Lynch, Enron, WorldCom, and even the Clinton White House learned in the past. But it's something else again when the e-mail you sent by mistake comes back to bite you, in your bony ass or otherwise. Just ask, among others, the woman who once blasted a co-worker for being "a suck-up," as Wired put it - that suck-up ended up becoming her boss. Or, the prankish worker who kiddingly signed an e-mail with her boss's name and the tagline, "who sits on her ass and does nothing all day." That tagline took on new meaning swiftly enough - she was fired, when she inadvertently included her boss on the copy/forward list.
How to avoid such calamity? Education, said Wired. "Having an acceptable-use policy for e-mail and instant messaging programs is one step, but formal training programs help 'teach everybody what the rules are'." And don't forget that what you do in cyberspace can come back to haunt you on Planet Terra Firma.
