For example, e-mailing a rant to a colleague about how much you hate your boss and ending up emailing it to your boss by mistake. Though it sounds cliche it allegedly happened to my uncle.
this happened to me about 3 years ago. My ****er of a boss sent an email out to myself and a few colleagues, ordering us to do something we all objected to. He really was Dilbert's pointy haired boss....a complete idiot....and worse, a complete idiot who seemed to enjoy ditching key members of his staff when he was in a bad mood. Now I loved this job, even though the boss was an idiot, and I would have been extremely gutted to lose it for stupid reasons.
But this one day I was still half cut from the night before and not feeling on my best form. So after receiving this **** of an email from him, I sent an email to my colleague (or at least thats what I thought) saying something like...
"What a ****er, who the **** does he think he is? c***."
But just as I clicked send, I realised that hadn't sen the email to my colleague, I had in fact sent it straight back to my boss. I was terror stricken. I got that sinking feeling you only experience as a kid, when you know you've done something really bad and you're gonna get a belt from your parents. Not a nice moment in my life. If this was a movie, the camera would have zoomed quickly in on my terror stricken face
Then a few seconds later, my brain kicked into gear, "wait a sec, my boss isn't in the office, he's on his way back from a meeting and is currently sat on a train, all I have to do is get the sys admin to delete the mail from the mail server before my boss gets back - which gives me about an hour - bargain!"
Just as I thought that, as if by some sick twist of fate, I heard my colleague talking on the phone "yeah ok chris", he was speaking to my boss on his mobile,"I'll do what I can to get you those figures, I'll call you back in 5 minutes after you've downloaded your email".....NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! This was like a double whammy....I lent across the desk to my colleague who was just putting the phone down...and....errr....well....I squeaked. I meant to talk, but my breath had been ripped from my lungs...and I just let out this breathless pant. My colleague miraculously sensing my anguish - which probably had something to do with seeing me red in the face, panting heavily, frantically leaning across the desk and pointing at the phone - picked up the phone again and said "err...just one other thing chris...about that...errr....spreadsheet". And it was with that that my body kicked into action. I leapt off my chair, skipped over the desk and darted out of the door - the company had two buildings seperated by about 100m of car park and the sys admin was in the other building. I slammed through the front door and put in a respectable 10.5s across the car park before slamming in through the other front door and grabbing the sys admin by the collar. After 30 uncomfortable seconds of panting, wheezing and generally trying to explain the story in as short terms as humanly possible, the sys admin said "oh ok, but the mail server is in the other building". SO, we both slammed through the front door again, put in another very impressive 100m time for 2 mid-twenties smokers and flew into the other building....to find my colleague again just about to put the phone down on the boss...again seeing this spectacle of red-faces, panting, wheezing and sweat he calmly said into the receiver "I know you need to get off to check your mail but just one other thing chris...", which gave my friendly sys admin the time he needed to wipe all recognition of the email from the web server.
And the moral of this story ladies and gentleman is, no matter what job you are in now and in the future, always befriend your company's system administrator, and preferably, always make sure that he always has a constant source for weed