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Company Accidentally Fires Entire Staff Via Email
redletterdave writes with an amusing tale of missent email. From the article: "On Friday, more than 1,300 employees of London-based Aviva Investors walked into their offices, strolled over to their desks, booted up their computers and checked their emails, only to learn the shocking news: They would be leaving the company. The email ordered them to hand over company property and security passes before leaving the building, and left the staff with one final line: 'I would like to take this opportunity to thank you and wish you all the best for the future. 'This email was sent to Aviva's worldwide staff of 1,300 people, with bases in the U.S., UK, France, Spain, Sweden, Canada, Italy, Ireland, Germany, Norway, Poland, Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Finland and the Netherlands. And it was all one giant mistake: The email was intended for only one individual."
It will now be two people leaving the company!
Those responsible should be sacked!
have the fucking balls to fire someone in person.
And it was all one giant mistake
I think it's more like snafu than mistake
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
How many "How you really feel" comments went around during this time that people are going to now have to live with.
This should have happened to the United States Congress.
That's pretty cold to send a termination email and not bother including their name in the message.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Never hire an employee named "allstaff".
That would be the worst.
First email: You're fired!
Second email: Oops. It was all a mistake. Only one person was supposed to be fired.
Third email: That person is you.
Their new email system will now redirect termination emails sent to all employees back to the sender.
keep up. This is days old.
The person wasn't fired. It seems to be a typical "last day" e-mail given to anyone leaving voluntarily.
This is not the first time that Alan 'Call me Al' Staff has caused this problem.
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
I was thinking first email: You're fired
Second emaol: Can someone fix the email?
Third email: Where is everyone? Can someone please fix the email?
That would be the worst.
First email: You're fired!
Oh, yah? Well screw you all! I never liked this company and pissed in the coffee daily. And Mr. CEO, I am banging your wife.
Second email: Oops. It was all a mistake. Only one person was supposed to be fired.
Uh....
Third email: That person is you.
Damn...
Human Resource Departments: the single biggest brake on the World's economy. The reason for the lack of productivity, innovation and creativity in most large enterprises.
It's a job that nobody with a brain ever wanted to do. Actually, it's a job that nobody ever wanted to do. Nobody ever grows up wanting to work in HR. The only people who do work in HR, are those who have failed. And they bear a grudge.
Which explains why their inhumanity creates situations like this one, and so many similar situations. With the technology currently available, real managers can manage. HR staff need to be fired. All of them, everywhere. The world never really needed them in the first place, but there's no justification for having them now.
The first corporation that has the insight to fire all its HR people will wipe the floor with its competition within 5 years. They will have all the advantages of a small business, mixed with the power of a corporation. And they will have MUCH happier, more productive, employees.
I was an administrator for a medium size tech company in the early nineties, and we got this all the time. The problem was not with the technically inept, but with the engineers, who would commonly send emails with:
mail -s "some subject line text" user_name (left_arrow) textfile
This was the same company that had a homegrown script to delete a user from the system. (Not written, maintained or owned by my team, I hasten to say.) The script had inadequate error checking, and if an operator hit carriage return without entering a user name, the script would delete the entire home directory structure on several machines. It kept us busy.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
no HR does not = no driver or other checks.
It's the manager / team lead who should be doing the hiring / firing. And some HR stuff can be done by the back office or having HR not control hiring
It happened when I was in support. I couldn't clock in. A told the manager about it and she was like, "maybe you got fired". We both had a good laugh about it because we were all on good terms. No mass layoffs were expected, this was the go-go 90s. Next day--still can't clock in. Manager is more serious. "I'll have to look into this". Sure enough, somebody fat-fingered me off the payroll.
It was actually a good thing--I got paid for my accumulated vacation hours. They couldn't figure out how to charge them back to vacation. They "re-hired" me and I got money. The vacation hours started accumulating from zero; but I had just taken a few days so I didn't mind saving up again. The money came in handy.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Bah. In any large organization, there is bound to be one person who doesn't understand the 'Reply to All' button, no matter how many Sunday afternoons you have put aside to teach them the basics of emailing. Said person should be fired (and the IT department, no doubt, would cheer you on as you did it).
I am John Hurt.
No employees truly offended? What planet is this man on?
Maybe one with employees of asset management firms who expect writing to be consistent with context, and would realise from this that something was wrong with the email? Or at least ones who would spot the subject line of the next email in their inbox which I presume went along the line of "OOPSIES!"
The second snafu is when 500 of those people did a Reply-All saying "sod off wankers!"
Average can mean any of median, mode, or mean (geometric, harmonic, arithmetic).
If you want to be precise and unambiguous, don't use the word.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
OK, he's banging my wife but:
I know he's doing it and
She can't complain about me banging my PA
And he'll do what he's told...all in all, a win/win situation.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The final line.... 'I would like to take this opportunity to thank you and wish you all the best for the future' ...seems to suggest that it wasn't supposed to be aimed at one person at all. Who would address a single person and say that?