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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.
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.
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?
I accidentally the entire company
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...
SNAFU is an apt description for doing anything "legal" via email or via the internet for that matter. Unfortunately it is becoming all too much the "norm" and billions are getting bilked from the systems every year. The free exchange of information is still all this is truly suitable for. Anything digital can be faked, intercepted, etc and after all this time there is no such thing as a "secure server", never has been, never will be, not functioning and connected to the internet at least (just to skip all the "disconnected, slagged, sealed in concrete and sunk to the bottom of the Marianas Trench type lines).
OK, everybody, ignore the ancient noise above and get back to making money off this stupidity!
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.
Situation Normal, All Fucked Up. Well, that's what I was taught it meant. And yes it is a SNAFU if your normal procedure for firing an employee is an e-mail. Man, that's fucked up...like being dumped over AOL Instant Messenger.
captcha: cunning
took me like 5 tries to get right....I knew "cumming" was wrong, but fuck those captchas can be hard to read
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.
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"?
You accidentally what?
The ENTIRE COMPANY!
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
It was invented by Disney during WW2 to help train soldiers to fight nazis. yes, they were trained by cartoons.
Snafu was actually Private Snafu, who just fucked up everything he touched. Don't be like Private Snafu.
It does mean "Situation normal all fucked up"
It was invented by Disney during WW2 to help train soldiers to fight nazis.
That sounded facinating, but when I went to learn more I found that Wikipedia disagrees with you. It cites several uses of the word prior to the creation of Private Snafu.
Still, it was interesting to find out about the Disney shorts. I must watch some on Youtube once my boss have left the building!
The second snafu is when 500 of those people did a Reply-All saying "sod off wankers!"
There's two fuckups I see:
1) They send letters with legal weight via e-mail and this is accepted. That's just wrong.
2) They wrote the e-mail so impersonal, without attribution, that 1300 people could mistakenly think they've been let off.
What a shithole company.
I must watch some on Youtube once my boss have left the building!
*bling* "You got mail!"
Gandhi's feelings on the matter regardless, WWII was probably the last war that the American public, as a whole, felt was worth fighting.