Inboxes at the New York Times were plagued on Thursday by one of the most odious afflictions of the modern workplace: the replyallpocalypse.
As everyone who has used email knows, a replyallpocalypse isn't simply an email chain with a lot of reply-alls. It's what happens when the reply-all emails, cascading out of control, become demands to be removed from the chain.
Epic email chain going down. At the stage of people telling other people not to respond to say to remove them.
At the Times, this digital horror show got so bad that a reporter wrote an article about it. "When I’m Mistakenly Put on an Email Chain, Should I Hit ‘Reply All’ Asking to Be Removed?" the headline asked.
"No," the one-word article answered.
BuzzFeed News has reviewed a copy of the offending replyallpocalypse and can confirm that it is indeed very bad.
It all started Thursday morning when an associate product manager sent out a link to travel deals. Unfortunately, she sent it to an email list that included many, many people at the company.
At first, things seemed OK.
Then the reply-alls started pouring in.
A lot of people were caught up in it, including a photo intern whose internship had ended a few days earlier.
Reminder: Gmail does have a "mute" button, for situations like this.
But when you're in the middle of a painful replyallpocalypse, it's only natural to feel the need to tell as many people as possible.
A sovereign border couldn't keep the replyallpocalypse at bay.
Someone tried to talk some sense.
But that didn't stop one final emailer from making sure that his voice, too, was heard.
