¶ four warding · 30 November 2005
At work I have stubbornly insisted on using Outlook Express in POP3 mode long after (even pre-acquisition) the rest of the organization switched to Outlook and all its Exchange baggage. One of my favorite effects of this is that since my email is simply downloaded to my PC, I am immune to the Belated Ass-Covering function. An Exchange sender can issue a "message recall", which causes the recalled email to silently vanish out of cooperative Outlook users' mailboxes. In Outlook Express, however, the original message stays where it is, and I get a separate plaintively ungrammatical text note. It looks (with names changed) like this:
Usually I, or my filters, have already deleted the message, but a recall attempt suggests that it's worth fishing it out of the trash folder to take a look. When there are three copies of the recall, it means Jon Brady would really, really, really like to recall this message.
If anybody in IT is monitoring recalls, Jon Brady is going to be recalling "top totty" for a very long and painful while, as he is now even more thoroughly fucked than the two women in the long series of photographs he forwarded. Normally it is sufficient to mention Rule 1 of corporate email-system use, which is "Never use your corporate email system to send pornography." Sadly, some people require the appending of Rule 2, which is "If you do, try really hard not to accidentally BCC a mailing list that reaches all 18,000 employees in the entire company." And, in this memorable case, Rule 3: "If you do insist on BCCing the entire company while forwarding explicit pornography, it is courteous to remove the incriminating trail of previous forwarders, especially the dozen or so soon-to-be-former friends who are fellow employees of the company from which you, and now they, are about to be fired."
PS, just to be sure, Rule 4: "If you find this sequence funny enough, or the pornography good enough, to want to save the evidence, don't keep it on your work computer, and don't use the corporate email system to forward it somewhere else."
Brady, Jon would like to recall the message, "top totty".
Usually I, or my filters, have already deleted the message, but a recall attempt suggests that it's worth fishing it out of the trash folder to take a look. When there are three copies of the recall, it means Jon Brady would really, really, really like to recall this message.
If anybody in IT is monitoring recalls, Jon Brady is going to be recalling "top totty" for a very long and painful while, as he is now even more thoroughly fucked than the two women in the long series of photographs he forwarded. Normally it is sufficient to mention Rule 1 of corporate email-system use, which is "Never use your corporate email system to send pornography." Sadly, some people require the appending of Rule 2, which is "If you do, try really hard not to accidentally BCC a mailing list that reaches all 18,000 employees in the entire company." And, in this memorable case, Rule 3: "If you do insist on BCCing the entire company while forwarding explicit pornography, it is courteous to remove the incriminating trail of previous forwarders, especially the dozen or so soon-to-be-former friends who are fellow employees of the company from which you, and now they, are about to be fired."
PS, just to be sure, Rule 4: "If you find this sequence funny enough, or the pornography good enough, to want to save the evidence, don't keep it on your work computer, and don't use the corporate email system to forward it somewhere else."