Reply-All Email Mistake Leads to Teacher's Dismissal at Marist College Ashgrove
Reply-All Email Mistake Leads to Teacher's Dismissal at Marist College Ashgrove
A longstanding science teacher at Marist College Ashgrove found himself unemployed in the fallout after a chain of events caused by an email that he accidentally sent to a number of people, after clicking ‘Reply All’ instead of 'Reply.'
If the article is accurate, it seems like a slam dunk case to me. He didn't say anything especially bad by any reasonable metric, and he was attempting to exercise his rights to make a complaint about the workplace conditions.
But among the remedies sought are re-employment. Unless the management responsible for the decision were themselves fired, I can't imagine wanting that in the circumstances. That said, while it's not within the court's power, the arse being fired for his abuse of power would not at all be an unwarranted result here.
@Zagorath I love me some spicy small-town drama.
Not too spicy though: small town east of Perth and a coworker disagreement turn into a shooting murder/suicide this week. Both locals; came out of nowhere. Town is reeling.
Yeah, I thought we were a little low on this kind of content in here!
@Zagorath i had to check where "in here" is, because I'm following you on Mastodon and all your posts just look like toots with a URL to me
This is my worst nightmare. Poor guy
In some email clients (including, I believe, at least one of the half-dozen or so different things called "Microsoft Outlook") reply all is the default way to reply, and you have to go out of your way to deliberately reply only to the sender.
This behaviour is, in my opinion, absolutely unconscionable. It’s just a horrendous anti-pattern that benefits nobody.
I wouldn't say reply all being the default benefits nobody. I've been is way too many email chains with 10+ people on copy where everyone needs to be notified and someone replies to just 1 at some point, then people don't get correctly notified and works gets harder. This happened weekly in the email chains I was at, which is I believe a much more recurring issue than someone replying to all when they shouldn't
If reply all were the default that would not happen. Also, usually in an email chain the people that are on copyare there becasue they should be kept up to date with whatever it's being discussed. If you want to say something private, maybe don't reply into a big chain, write a new post or single reply manually.
Not saying that the reverse doesn't have benefits either, I'm just showing you that yeah, reply all being the default DOES have benefits and that it is not a horrendous anti-pattern".
Edit: Damn, the message was "We have amazing IT staff, but recently the big end of town needs to stop feeding at the pool tuck shop and live up to their $250,000 job". I would triple check before sending this. In fact I wouldn't send this, this sound way too risky to send over email, I'd use a new email or Teams.
Hahah ouch!