Saturday, May 08, 2010

The Power of Email

This week at work was ... shall we say ... entertaining. As I've mentioned, I work for a pretty big company and am in a somewhat mid-to-high profile department. Meaning high visibility, especially when something goes wrong. Well, this week we had an email start floating around with some confidential information ... about special dress code weeks. See, we have a formal dress code (suits, etc.) and when we are able to wear casual clothes, people kind of go nuts. They eat it up. Jeans for a week, woohoo! (unfortunately, I currently don't own any jeans, so I'm not exactly participating, but it's nice not to be confined to feeling more formal.) Well, my team happens to know when these special weeks take place and we summed it up for our partners in HR. Somehow ... this email leaked ... and it's spreading like the chicken pox in kindergarten.

My two thoughts ... what idiot started sending it outside the circle of "need to know." Because I'm sorry, everyone who got the original email should have known better. Second, it made me laugh at how quickly it spread. To me that sends a signal that, frankly, people are tired of wearing the suits and ties ... if they are getting this excited about knowing when they can wear jeans the rest of the year. The even funnier thing was how quickly people got worked up about the email leak. I understand, it should never have happened -- and I do have to blame HR for letting it leak -- but it's just the dress code people. It's not some secret competitive secret or a new product hitting the market. It's things like this that make shows like The Office so gosh darn relatable.

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