PLEASE DO NOT REPLY ALL!!

It started with an innocent invite from another group to showcase future business models within the company.  The problem was it was sent to potentially every IT employee in the company which equates to about 5,000.  An innocent mistake?  Who knows.  Maybe the intent is that everyone from IT should be aware of whats to come as it may have an impact on your job. 

For me, i simply saw the invite, read it through and thought this is definitely not something intended for me and ignored it.  The hashtag framed invite sad lonely in my MS Outlook calendar next to other happy black framed accepted invites.  Aint nobody got time for that. 

A month or so later, another invite.  I did the same -- ignored it and it went away.  The same the next month. 

Then, like a sad Unicorn looking for a rainbow on a bright sunny day, it happened.  The first email came from someone in Brazil.  It said "Please remove me from this. I don't believe this was intended for me."  And just like that a spark was born.  Like a tiny ember from a cigarette touching a dry withered blade of grass on a patch of dry land in the middle of a drought, a fire started.  The wind picked up and that bad boy went global and oh boy did it not stop. 

Following that first email from Brazil came 2 more.  Then 3. Then 5.  Suddenly everyone from around the world got in on the fun.  And within 10 minutes, my email inbox now had 55 unread emails requesting to be "kindly removed from this discussion". 

And then the rebuttal started..

Dear All,
Please do not reply all when replying.  You are emailing everyone on this invite.  

Thanks,
Idiotic Person who replied all

It was then a full on clash between those wanting to be removed from the invites and with those asking to stop replying all.  This battle went on for another 2 days with both sides getting some great jabs in.  

I was on vacation and came back to -- no joke -- 175 unread emails.  Most were conversations that took place between the correspondents stating the obvious "do not reply all" but yet replying all to tell everyone to not reply all. Because this makes sense.

I believe as i type there are still people replying all to tell everyone to stop replying all because replying all is clogging up all our emails.  Yet as this is going on, new people will jump in on the fun and reply all, to tell those that were replying all,  to stop replying all, and that they are also causing email clogs because they too are replying all, however they are also replying all to all.  Ya see the redundancy in this whole thing!  I am exhausted. 

Then came the do-gooders who want to show ALL by replying all that there is a way to block or ignore this conversation. One person showed his way. Another person showed their way. And then this battle went on for another 4 hours.  I am not sure who won that one. 

And as this is going on its visible to all of our VPs and SVPs and management in IT.  What a great way for visibility i thought so i decided to write the following:

Dear Reply-All People,

Every time you reply all, a kitten dies.  

Thanks in advance
Danny Bart 

That oughta do the trick. But wait, did i just kill a kitten??

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