So I work for a rather large company.  Or I should say, I work on the Technical Support side of a rather large company.  Everyone in this company uses Outlook to send and receive corporate emails.  Of course all these emails are backed by Exchange servers.  We also have a company wide distribution list (DL) that when you send an email to it, the email goes to EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE COMPANY.

Anyways, about once every few months we'll get a rouge email, probably from a new employee, that will be accidentally sent to this corporate DL.  So in other words, everyone in the comany (several thousand people) just received this email.  Now if it ends there, like it should, then that's fine.  I mean, we all make mistakes.  No one's going to fire you for accidentally sending an email to everyone.  No big deal.

Now the next logical process would be to ignore and delete this email.  I mean, you just got some random email from someone in the company you don't know.  You would then check to see who this email was sent to.  Was it sent directly to you?  If so, it would have your name in the To field.  But no, instead you would find that the email was sent to the corporate DL.  You might then mumble under your breath the word idiot, and then promptly delete the email and move on with your work day.

Well, when the majority of the people in your company are non-technical, the fun doesn't stop there.  Nope.  Instead you'll get someone who will hit the 'Reply to All' button, which sends an email back to the original sender as well as the corporate DL.  This 'Reply to All' person will usually say one of the following in their response email:

"Please don't reply to all!"
"Huh?"
"Please remove me from these emails/DL."
"Me too!"
"EVERYONE STOP USING REPLY TO ALL!!!"
"Did you also get this email?  So did I.  Please remove me."
"Me too, again."
"Please take me off the reply to all list"
"Everyone! Stop hitting reply to all!"
"I'm an idiot."
"if everyone stops hitting reply to all this will stop!"

These same responses continue about 170 more times.  Finally they stop when either A) a high powered director/manager/president sends a threatening letter to the DL, or B) the Exchange admins finally disable the DL.  But usually before that happens, the Exchange servers finally crash due to the overwhelming load of thousands of emails being sent simultaneously.

Oh, it's fun watching these emails.  My coworkers and I will just stop what we're doing, sit back, and watch the mayhem ensue.  I just love the emails that state this, "if everyone stops hitting reply to all this will stop!"  Does anyone else see the irony in this?  Well, maybe it's not irony.  Hypocrite would be a better word.  It's kind of like if everyone was beating each other up, and some guy joins in and starts beating up these people to get them to stop.  Lol.