Don't Insult the Man with the Rope

For those of you who get here from my Twitter account, you’ll already know something about this…

The people I support are idiots.

For those of us living in an era beyond AOL (you know, everyone had this service in the mid-late nineties), we know that once you send an email, that’s it. This is the reason why there are so many jokes/commercials/sitcoms that use the premise of “oops, I shouldn’t have sent that email, now my boss knows I’m <something bad>.” Anyone using a modern email system should know that if you send an email, it’s like walking up to your boss and telling him off — the results are inevitable.

Why we still have people who believe that “recalling” email is possible is beyond me. Honestly, I do blame AOL. Back in the day, if you had an account with them, and you were emailing someone else on the system, you had an “oh shit, unsend!” button. This created a generation of mindless slugs, brainwashed into believing that the AOL way is the only way. Mind you, it’s these same people who are now cursing the fall of their beloved service…

I digress. Long story short, one of the people I’m supposed to support just called in saying “oh, a professor sent something out he shouldn’t have, I know you guys can get this out of the system, will you please recall the email?” How about… no. Unless you want me to go in to every single person’s email that he sent it to, manually, on a server I don’t even have permissions for, invading people’s privacy and essentially getting my ass fired on the spot, it’s not going to happen. I like my job far more than I like you, lady, so Mr. Professor is going to have to deal with the consequences of an itchy trigger finger (or send-button-finger?). I’m sure once the word spreads around about his screw up, there’ll be a good laugh had by all.

Maybe they’ll even make it into a TV commercial.

P.S. - To those of you out there who use iOS based devices (iPhone, iPad, etc), I’ve found that the lack of rotation on the iPod touch app makes posting a pain in the ass. Can you recommend a better app than the generic Tumblr app?