A thousand and one things could go wrong in one’s workplace. Some could be handled immediately, some may take some time to resolve, others may require the help of another professional, and some are so cringe-worthy, even a fleeting memory of it brings a lemony look over your face.
Even Ex-President Obama attested to the minefield that emailing can face, as that was his primary mode of communication while he was in the White House.
Emails don’t seem to be going anywhere soon and while some of us are contending with fast-filling inboxes, having doom stories to tell about what went wrong in our emails should not be added to our list of “Stories to tell at a Sunday Barbecue”.
Sadly, here are some common doom stories from work, especially from within the world of your inbox, that could literally turn your day on its head in a split second and as I’ve mentioned earlier, it is definitely something we could all do without.
Story 1: CC someone with an attachment they should not get
So imagine you are about to leave work. It’s been a pretty exhausting day as the personal assistant to the International Marketing Director in your firm, and you are so looking forward to going home, getting off your feet and taking the most prolonged bathtub-soak possible.
You have just one final task to cross off your list for the day – sending your Boss an itinerary of her trip to Japan that comes up in 6 days. You copy the head of the Research and Development team in Japan and hit Send. Now you can pack the rest of your bags and your trusty water bottle and bid the echoing office walls goodbye for the weekend.
You just waved to Kev who mans the security desk on most Friday evenings. Suddenly, your phone rings, and it’s the CIO at your office. You think he’s about to ensure you double-checked the email software updates recently installed on the IMD’s desktop. Alas, it turns out you copied the entire staff in the mail containing your boss’ Japan itinerary [Cringe].
Story 2: Sending the wrong attachment
“RE: THE VALENTINE PROMO E-FLIER
Hi Brian,
Great work. However, I believe that we agreed at our last department’s meeting to have the position of the logo in the e-flier to go from the bottom right corner to the top left corner.
Find attached the Thanksgiving e-flier sample from last year as a reference of what we’re aiming for.
Celia.”
This was the mail you sent to a member of your design team who just joined the fast-rising multimedia app company you founded with two of your best friends.
The attachment you sent with this mail, however, turned out to be a picture of your Aunt Sally’s cat you always meant to delete and somehow, you managed to miss the mistake because you were in a hurry to get to an investors’ meeting [Cringe].
Story 3: Deleting or losing a message or attachment (or not being able to find it)
It’s 1:42 pm, just about 18 minutes to the end of your lunch break. Your stomach has been on a growling fest especially since you only had a granola bar for breakfast, a choice made in a bid to save time in addressing the extensive list of correspondence on your desk for the day. A few more clicks and you shut the lid of your pc, go out to the nearest café for a much-needed sugar rush in the form of some Nutella-filled glazed doughnuts, the creamiest biscuits on offer and some latte.
You return to your desk, restart your pc and discover that you can’t find the email containing the product order specifications from a prospective client referred to you by your friend, Mai who just happens to be the CTO of the biggest multinational in your city. You had exchanged emails with the client, right before your lunch break and the required action was that you forwarded his specifications of quantity and sizes to the production team to be filled and delivered before the Easter holidays.
It would have been more comfortable to ask that he resend the email to you. Still, you are hard-pressed to do so because it initially took extensive efforts to convince him to take the plunge as one of the distributors for your spices production company, to begin with [Cringeeeee].
How can you afford any of the above scenarios from being a tale you tell your friends and/or family members?
Join the “No Attachment” Party.
Keep all your emails and/or email attachments in cloud storage (e.g. Box, Egnyte, Microsoft OneDrive or Google Drive) to capture all your emails (both inbound and outbound, from any device type, operating system or platform) with no intervention or workflow disruption.
One thing that makes MxHero the best email management software to use is the ease of searching, through thousands and thousands of emails that have been intelligently filed and/or archived, for that one email that seems lost to everybody else, or you, in just a few clicks.
What email/attachment ‘accidents’ have you had at work? How did you recover from it? What mistake happens more often than others? Let us know in the comments below.
Remember that at any moment you can go from doom to bloom at work and let all those cringy moments become ghosts of emails past with the newly improved mxHero having the latest plugin that allows for seamless integration with your cloud storage service.
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