Take your hands away from that button
A FRIEND OF mine, furious with her boyfriend, sent him a message on the office intranet system—and accidentally pressed the “send to all staff” button.
The two-word curse phrase signed with her name went to everyone in the company, including her boss and her boss’s boss.
She left the firm shortly afterwards.
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Tales of the “reply all” problem are growing, with at least six on my Facebook page in the past week.
The worst concerned student Max Wiseltier, who tried to forward a note to his mom, but hit Reply All and sent it to all 40,000 students at New York University.
He then sent 40,000 apologies.
Other students, realizing they had stumbled on a way to address everyone, kept the mass conversation going.
Some were grandiose:
“I want all of us to be happy forever.”
Others used it for important bits of research:
“Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses, or one horse-sized duck?”
A reader told me that you can now buy software that stops you pressing “Reply All”. Thanks, but I already have software that does that, it’s called “my brain”.
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IN OTHER NEWS….
JAPAN HAS more old people, proportionally, than any other country. So there’s a soaring demand in the adult video industry for old actresses. “Now young girls are the ones stubbornly refusing to give their real ages,” a producer told News Post Seven, a Japanese website. “Sometimes a 25-year-old tries to convince us she’s 40.”
Tip: spend an evening drinking shochu at the Albatross rooftop bar in Tokyo and you’ll wake up feeling/ looking 140.
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PROFESSIONAL SICK people are hiring themselves out to medical colleges to be ill on demand.
For the equivalent of US$9, an individual will suffer the ailment of the doctor’s choice for a full day, the Indian press reported.
The pretend patient service sprang into being in the Indian state of Karnataka after the Medical Council of India started regularly inspecting private medical colleges.
Thinks: Many office workers I know do highly believable impersonations of people suffering from terminal laziness. Can we now get paid for this?
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THE LINE in your typical funeral service about being “laid to eternal rest” will have to be removed in crowded Singapore, I hear from a reader there.
Leaders said corpses have to be dug up after 15 years to make room for essential utilities, such as new 7-Elevens selling exactly the same items as the other 7-Elevens a few meters away.
If people complain, officials point to Hong Kong, where “eternal rest” is a mere six years.
What do officials in Hong Kong and Singapore do with the noxious rotting corpses they dig up? Evidence suggests most are put to work driving taxis.
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A BELGIAN MAN wants to have his marriage annulled after discovering that the Indonesian spouse to whom he has been married for 19 years was actually a man. “I never noticed anything,” he told the Het Nieuwsblad newspaper last week. Women always claim men are unobservant: I guess this is proof.
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NICE BIT of wisdom from a reader named Sharif67: “Celebrities are called ‘stars’ because they’re hot, not very bright, unattainable, and eventually collapse into black holes.”
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SOME VERY NICE original lines during the discussion on vegetarianism this week, following the school textbook that said meat-eaters were evil. Some of the best are reproduced below:
Do meat-eaters tell more lies than vegetarians?
TS: “But of course we lie more. We are also smarter than vegetarians. It takes a lot of cunning to stalk and an animal to be killed for food, so anything goes. Vegetarians only have to plunk down on their behinds in some bushy area and start eating their surroundings.”
Lift Lurker: To solve the problem of it is better to be vegetarian, vegan, carnivore, or omnivore, maybe we can replace the Olympics with Diet Olympics. No more national team. Just 4 teams, one for each foodie group.
Which team will get the most gold?
Will the carnivore die of heart attack during games?
Can the vegans lift more than 10 kilos of weight?
Mandatory testing of vegetarians to check for trace of hamburger in blood stream.
Private Beach: “Can I be the first of the inevitable flood of readers to point out that Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian?”
TS: During the vegetarian zombie apocalypse the living corpses will groan: “Grains. Grains. GRAINS.”
Dancer: I'm not a vegetarian. How come I never win a fight with my husband, who doesn't eat meat? I tried everything I can think of to fight dirty and still I couldn't win. What do you suggest? I eat more meat?
Grandpa sent in an amazing video of fish which have developed a taste for fowl.
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