The hazards of email

I received an odd and unexpected email at work today. It was more than obvious the person clicked something incorrectly, or has type-ahead turned on when keying in addresses. The email I received contained the persons resume in it. Now, considering we work for the same company and she is not in my field - and the "Career Objective” didn’t mention anything about a change of career – I know I was not the intended recipient. I also know it wasn’t sent just to me. This was sent to a group of which I happen to be a member. Whether this person had created a group with the same name and put it in her personal address book and assumed she was sending it to them, I don’t know. I suspect that is not the case though – else it would have gone to her local group – that is the way enterprise email systems work.

As for the pros & cons of letting co-workers know you’re job hunting – well, that debate could swing either way.

However, this email carelessness seems to be happening more and more often. I’m not sure if it’s due to people being overly confident that the computer just knows who they mean when they type the first couple of letters into the recipient field, or perhaps it’s a matter of becoming lazy and not double checking. I have to admit half the time I respond to email on auto-pilot. Just hit ‘respond’ or ‘respond to all’. But, when I am sending a highly sensitive email I always double-check the email addresses.