SEND Button Crises

Some crisis prevention is pretty darn mundane.

Most of us, at least once, have embarrassed ourselves or even caused significant harm by sending email (a) to people who should not have seen it or (b) containing accurate or inaccurate information that we belatedly regretted providing. In 2003, Cornell University sent welcoming letters to 1,700 high school students who had submitted early-decision applications, including nearly 550 who had already been rejected in December. Soon thereafter, it sent another email apologizing for any confusion and distress the message had caused and explaining that it was a result of a coding error. The apology didn't, of course, protect the 550 students from the emotional whiplash which resulted, although the school then did the best damage control it could muster under the circumstances.

Here are some very low-tech, practical ways of reducing the frequency of "SEND Button Crises":

Don't Fill In The "To" Blank -- If you don't fill in your addressee's name, the email can't be sent. That precludes crises resulting simply from accidentally hitting the SEND button with a mouse click or by the keyboard combination which also activates SEND (e.g., in Outlook or Outlook Express, Alt-S). Ummm...you DID know that the effect of most mouse clicks can be duplicated by a keyboard command, right? (Methinks I'm going to hear the sound of some palms striking foreheads with comments such as "oh, that's why *that* happened.)

Use Draft Mode -- Most email programs allow you to save work-in-progress in a Draft folder. With Outlook Express, for example, CNTL-S will save email in your Draft folder. Yahoo Mail has a SAVE AS A DRAFT button right next to the SEND button. Keep saving in Draft mode until you're sure the email is ready to go.

SEND to Yourself First -- Before I distribute an important document, I email it to myself first and see what it looks/reads like, in addition to asking at least one person to proofread it for me. I'm old-style enough that for careful proofing, I need to print something out. I have found multiple errors in one of my newsletters, for example, after proofreading a printout. And I'm now braced for readers of this article to point out some errors that might have been missed (he said with a grin).

Minimize Emotional Misinterpretation -- It is VERY VERY easy to read emotions into someone's written words. Sometimes accurately, sometimes not, either way with periodically disastrous results. I have had readers take offense at their interpretation of what I've written, even though I'd meant something significantly different. One way to minimize that is to take a bit more time in writing to add words which communicate how you're feeling. Read the last sentence of the previous bullet point as an example. Another technique - and this tends to work best with those of us who have been online a long time and/or are under 40 -- is to use "emoticons," aka "smilies." Be careful about who you send emoticons -- some simply don't believe they belong in anything but personal email. I have clients who use them all the time.

Will we all still goof once in a while? Probably. I recommend you share them with your coworkers and your overall incidence of "Send Button Crises" will go down.