This Week in Fuck You: Reply to All

Before we get started I want to say that yes, I do realize that it has been a while since I posted a TWIFY. I can’t just get angry about something for your amusement. I’m not a goddamn dancing monkey. And with that… we begin!

Reply to All is a great feature. It helps to when you’re communicating with multiple people so that you can send out a single message and have it simultaneously reach everyone on the list. It’s great for collaboration through email and it saves a lot of time when you want to convey one thought to a group of people. I love Reply to All.

What I don’t love is that any fucking idiot with a pulse and an email client is allowed to use it. Last week there was an email sent out by someone at my company that simply had “test” as the subject line. Nothing in the body, no details as to what the originator was attempting to test, just 4 letters in the subject line of a blank email. You would think that after so many years of having email as an integral part of our lives that people would know the difference between “Reply” and “Reply to All” and when to use each one. Unfortunately you would be incredibly wrong.

That picture up there? Yeah, that’s a shot of what my inbox looked like after I got back from lunch. 115 emails, and almost every single one of them was complaining about having their inbox filled by people hitting the Reply to All button. Really? How does that make sense? You’re doing the exact thing that you’re asking people to stop doing you drooling ape. How many cans of Krylon do you have to inhale before this seems like a viable alternative to just deleting the damned emails?

I went through them and pulled out some of my favorites. Please note that these are directly copied and pasted (with the exception of the name removal) so you can see that the idiots that click Reply to All on a gigantic distribution list are also dumb enough to fuck up your/you’re and abbreviate “please” to the tween-text-speak “pls”, which should be a surprise to absolutely no one.

• Well depending on what your testing I would think it worked
• May I suggest that we don’t reply to all? This is a significant list, and it will just fill up our mailboxes.
• ONLY!!! Reply to (originator’s name). Stop spamming everyone!!! I am about to report this to Security Div.
• Pls stop “Reply to All” emails. Thank you!
• REMOVE ME FROM YOUR EMAILS IMMEDIATELY! (thanks)
• Could you guys only reply to the sender please. I have enough corporate spam as it is. Thank you.
• All… Can someone stop this test, my email inbox is saturated….I am not really interested in any of this !!!!!
• Stop – you are killing my inbox
• It didn’t work for me… can you resend it to everyone again?
• Is it possible for everyone to just reply versus reply all? I am quite sure this is going to hose up our mailbox storage.
• STOP REPLY ALL PLEASE!!!!
• Please do not hit reply all
• Folks – we all know better than to use Replay to all when responding to a message that went out to a distribution list Please stop
• You are jamming the Net work with test message!!!
• People this is a virus do not respond at all.
• Please discontinue further responses to this e-mail chain.
• Why am I on distribution for this stuff? Please stop copying me on this test.
• Not sure what your testing, but count me in!
• Pls. don’t reply to all. Successful test.
• Come on. This is getting out of hand. Stop replying to all.
• I am somehow being copied on your emails and have notified the help desk.
• Stop this virus right now STOP!!
• PLEASE DO NOT REPLY…THIS WAS ONLY A TEST
• Please stop copying to me.
• PLEASE STOP COPING ALL OF US!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
• OK already on the test. IT WORKS.
• What is this? Test for…………………?

Sweet backflipping Christ, you fucking clowns never cease to baffle me. Some of my favorites on the list are the 2 “virus” responses and the people complaining about storage. Firstly, I feel inclined to point out that storage in your Outlook is limited only by the amount of storage you have on your computer. So you work for a government agency and they only allow you so much space on their Outlook server because you’re a lowly contractor? There’s a way around this. It’s called a “Personal Folder” and the functionality is built right into Outlook. Make a personal folder on your local drive, create a rule in Outlook to copy all of your mail to that folder, and you’ll never have to worry about running out of space ever again. Best of all, you won’t look like a babbling retard when you say shit like this:

Is it possible for everyone to just reply versus reply all? I am quite sure this is going to hose up our mailbox storage.

Fuck you and your storage problems. They only exist because you’re an idiot, a fact you reinforced when you hit Reply to All and whined about it. Slap yourself until you understand why that’s a stupid thing to do. Even if you’re commenting about server storage and not personal storage, you just added several thousand emails to the system.

And then we have the “virus” people. No, Tweedle-Dumb and Tweedle-Dumber, this isn’t a virus. This is just classic human stupidity at work. The sad thing here is that stupidity isn’t a virus. If it were, then maybe it would be excruciatingly painful for the people that are afflicted and we could look forward to someday finding a cure. As it stands the only people that truly suffer are the people that have the good fortune to not be stricken by this malady because we have to deal with and straighten out all of the shit that people infected with a debilitating case of stupid manage to  fuck up on an hourly basis.

Hitting Reply to All to tell everyone to “only reply to the sender”? Fucking genius. Copernicus would be humbled by your mere presence, were he alive today to witness it. Serious question – Are you capable of walking and breathing at the same time or do you have to stop every couple of steps to refill your lungs? That’s like telling someone not to talk while they eat when you’re spraying half-chewed pork chop sandwiches out of your face. I’m having trouble figuring out how it is possible for this to go through your brain without hitting a stopping point. How are you able to type this out and honestly say to yourself “Yeah, that looks good, I’ll click the send button”? Help me understand why you don’t instantly look at that and say “Holy goat cheese, I’m a blathering moron. I need to delete this before someone discovers my secret!” I would like to say that using more exclamation points on a single email subject than the writers of Dragon Ball Z used for an entire season really lends a legitimacy to your statement that it wouldn’t otherwise have. Kudos to you, sir or madam.

I really don’t know how this keeps happening. If you are genuinely bothered dozens of people hitting “Reply to All” and blanketing a huge distribution list with mindless garbage, why would you do it yourself? You can’t complain about people urinating in the community pool while you’re draining your bladder in the deep end. Think about it, people. That’s exactly what you’re doing here. You’re standing on the edge of the high dive with your dick in your hand, blasting a stream of golden piss right down into the swimming hole below while screaming at the top of your lungs “NO PEEING IN THE POOL!” If you’re truly annoyed by these actions, just delete the emails. Hitting that “Reply to All” button is just throwing more wood on the fire.