Have you ever sent an embarrassing text or email?

One thing that always annoyed me was those email filters that many organisations use. While I appreciate that some form of safeguard is required, you often find that they block out perfectly innocent emails.

Sometimes, this is merely mildly irritating, but it can have repercussions for more serious stuff. As an example, I used to work for a company that produced telephone billing systems and we had a lot of different clients around the world. I worked in IT support, so our main job was fixing things. One of our biggest clients had a problem with their system and to cut the story short a bit, we traced the error to a file that held details of calls. The file was known as the cumulative calls file and part of its system name was the abbreviation CUM. I had sent them a corrected version via email, but what happened (which it took a couple of days to discover) was that the email filter had decided I was sending something pornographic and blocked it. Result: unhappy clients.
 
Similar to the above, but involving a bit of naive thinking on my part, I had an email blocked because of an apparent naughty word. I'd had a weekend trip to the area in the north of Scotland between Aberdeen and Inverness, round the area of Elgin. During the visit, we had spotted some birds that are very rare in the UK, in fact largely confined to this small area of Scotland. As a birder, I was naturally quite enthused about this and when I got into work on the Monday morning, I emailed a couple of colleagues that I knew were also keen on the subject. Unfortunately, the birds in question were Crested Tits.

You can guess the rest.
 
Duck59 said:
I was reminded of a story that illustrates how miscommunication was happening long before emails and text messages. A friend of mine ended up with a slightly different name than the one that the parents had given her because the registrar misread my friend's father's handwriting. Her name was meant to be Suzette, but her father used to write the letter z to look rather like a 3. The upshot was that the registrar mistakenly recorded it as Susette. Of course, the recipient of the name was oblivious to all this and rather liked her name because it was slightly unusual, though she was generally known as Susie to her friends.
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Two sisters I know have identical first and second names. When their dad went to register the birth of the second one, the registrar asked him what his daughter's name is, and of course he said ........ The older one has always been known by her first name, and the younger by her second name because of this.
 
Elawin said:
Two sisters I know have identical first and second names. When their dad went to register the birth of the second one, the registrar asked him what his daughter's name is, and of course he said ........ The older one has always been known by her first name, and the younger by her second name because of this.
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Why would anyone do that?:scratchhead:
 
Lullabelle said:
No but I once sent 1 without first saying hello or good morning, apparently the receiver thought it was a bit rude even though it wasn't meant to be.
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I think sometimes we can overlook a missed good morning or hello if then the tone of the email is friendly and kind, and you do not seem rude or indelicate to me even if I do not know you.:) Then it also depends on what degree of confidence and what kind of relationship there is. You recall me that recently I received a warning from the tone not at all affable .. despite there was a hello.
 
MypinchofItaly said:
Then it also depends on what degree of confidence and what kind of relationship there is.
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This is a very good and important point. How we communicate with people is relative to how well we know them and the degree of familiarity. You could say exactly the same thing to two different people and communicate an entirely different meaning. For example, if a long-standing friend greeted me with something along the lines of, "How are you doing, you drunken Irish git?" that would be completely different to being addressed in such a way by someone that I didn't know very well. So in one case, it's a friendly greeting and in the other, it's horribly abusive. The words are the same, the context is not.
 
Duck59 said:
This is a very good and important point. How we communicate with people is relative to how well we know them and the degree of familiarity. You could say exactly the same thing to two different people and communicate an entirely different meaning. For example, if a long-standing friend greeted me with something along the lines of, "How are you doing, you drunken Irish git?" that would be completely different to being addressed in such a way by someone that I didn't know very well. So in one case, it's a friendly greeting and in the other, it's horribly abusive. The words are the same, the context is not.
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@Duck59

I agree with you totally ..

Hilarious name for a bird .. Crested Tits !! I wonder who named this bird in Scotland !

In Canadian and American English, this bird is called a Blue Jay or Jay depending on their color ..

Ha Ha Ha ..
 
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Francesca said:
Hilarious name for a bird .. Crested Tits !! I wonder who named this bird in Scotland !
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I think you are confusing the Blue Jay which from the Corvidae family (crow family) with the crested tit which is a much smaller bird of the Paridae family. There are several types of tits in the UK - coal tits, blue tits, long-tailed tits. They are very small birds.
 
Duck59 said:
This is a very good and important point. How we communicate with people is relative to how well we know them and the degree of familiarity. You could say exactly the same thing to two different people and communicate an entirely different meaning. For example, if a long-standing friend greeted me with something along the lines of, "How are you doing, you drunken Irish git?" that would be completely different to being addressed in such a way by someone that I didn't know very well. So in one case, it's a friendly greeting and in the other, it's horribly abusive. The words are the same, the context is not.
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@Duck59 certainly, I agree with what you write. The less formal and more colloquial language is proportionate to the degree of knowledge and even more to that of confidence. Not with all my friends (even people with long knowledge and confidence) I have the same way to speak/write and vice versa, because then intervenes the character, the nuances, the moment, the context, the time. Then there is confidence and confidence. I like people to whom do not need to say "you are taking too much confidence" but that they know how to understand for themselves what can be said and when and what not or not at that time.
But when you are dealing with someone we know little or do not know at all, regardless of the context and the way in which you communicate, then I think it is obvious to maintain a certain distance but with a friendly attitude.
For work I often write mails or rather pragmatic messages because it lacks material time and the motivation to be more narrative. When, instead, years ago I worked in the Personnel Management of a company, communication, especially via e-mail (including commas) was fundamental and sometimes dangerous. Commas became the essence of communication ... a stress that never ended.
But if someone I do not know writes me with a smile (which, however, by e-mail is understood), I answer him with two :happy::happy:
 
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