It is tempting to believe that people who don't know the difference between reply and reply to all are stupid. However, I saw an example of this a couple of years ago, on a mailing list that casts doubt on this theory. What happened was that the person who replied to the list wanted to mail the sender to discuss the arrangements for the upcoming PhD oral examination of a graduate student. Accidentally, he mailed the entire list with comments about the student that should definitely have been kept private.

Was the sender stupid? Well, he does have a Fields medal (the equivalent in mathematics of a Nobel prize) so I'd have to say no, just not particularly focused on email.

Once, I applied for a job at a local ISP which will remain nameless. I knew the owner, and he knew that I was a student. He told me to apply for this job that he hadn't posted, without writing a résumé. He wanted me to do a bunch of bizarre writing exercises. I think the job was some sort of Public Relations gig, but it was impossible to tell.

Anyway, simply for the sake of doing it, I took a stab at some of the exercises. The guy's a complete narcissist, and as a result the exercises were impossible (because the person who got the job had to be a better writer than this guy). But I took a stab at it anyway.

So a couple of days later, I get this e-mail from his desk. The problem is, it lists every other applicant in the "To:" field.

In all fairness, this is a simple mistake to make — if you're a newbie. But this guy was the owner of the bloody ISP! And furthermore, he made a big deal about the requirement that the person who gets the job will be more skilled at writing than he was; and yet, it seems, I'm more tech-savvy than he, and I don't know PGP from a firewall.

My mum was one of the other applicants. I recognised some of the other names. We all got a good laugh out of it.

But the worst was yet to come. Instead of handling his mistake professionally, he followed up with an authoritarian e-mail in which he insisted that if we had copies of the original message stored, we had to trash them and then delete them. He also said that, although he knew some of us had e-mailed one another (obviously, of course, to laugh at his incompetence), we were not to do that any more. Those who already had would be forgiven.

Geez, man, you don't own my hard drive.

If you make the mistake, laugh it off. And if you're an arrogant ISP owner and you make the mistake, stop being so damn arrogant. It was pretty funny, though, to see the big guy botch a simple group e-mail.