Email

Have you ever received a funny email from a friend and then forwarded it to some other friends on your mail list? Sure! We all have! Especially if it's a funny email! If it is a bit on the "not-so-nice" side we just send it to the few of our closer friends that would giggle and be done with it. My question is this, do you ever pay attention to which email address you received the email from? I mean, you know it's from your friend, but do you pay attention to whether it's from their work email or personal email? Well, I don't, until now that is...

I got a funny little email from a dear friend today, just a quick little off joke with A bad word in it. I laughed, and without even thinking passed it on to about eight of my friends, some were hers as well, that I knew would get a kick out of it. Well, one of the people on the list sent her an email letting her know that I am forwarding emails from her work address that aren't the kind that you want with a work address attached. She and I were both mortified. She was, of course, because it was her name and work email address. I was because I forwarded it. I felt horrible. I apologized. So, she asked me to send out a note asking them not to forward it. So I did.

But later on thought more about it. A work address with an "off" joke on it! Yikes! I never pay attention to which address people send me things. If it has their name on it (which AOL automatically does) I don't stop to look. Then I thought, what about things that I've sent? Could they have been from an address that I shouldn't have sent them from? Hmmm, no, I can't send things from work. But if I had, wouldn't that be awful?

I read recently in People Magazine where some companies are actually firing people because of a Blog. Even blogs that don't talk about work directly per say (well, some did) but some were fired just because they simply HAD a blog and COULD discuss personal things that would be considered unethical by the company and hence against the company's ethics policies. One of the guys that was fired from his job worked for Google. The company that owned Google actually owned the site that his blog was from. That was weird to me. He had a blog and worked for the company that owned the blog... He mentioned on his blog some work stuff and that gave them enough reason to fire him. He didn't reveal any deep dark secrets from work, just mentioned light things from his day to day and that did include "work" mentions as well.

Thought it was something to think about...