Company Accidentally Fires Entire Staff Via Email 333
redletterdave writes with an amusing tale of missent email. From the article: "On Friday, more than 1,300 employees of London-based Aviva Investors walked into their offices, strolled over to their desks, booted up their computers and checked their emails, only to learn the shocking news: They would be leaving the company. The email ordered them to hand over company property and security passes before leaving the building, and left the staff with one final line: 'I would like to take this opportunity to thank you and wish you all the best for the future. 'This email was sent to Aviva's worldwide staff of 1,300 people, with bases in the U.S., UK, France, Spain, Sweden, Canada, Italy, Ireland, Germany, Norway, Poland, Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Finland and the Netherlands. And it was all one giant mistake: The email was intended for only one individual."
Wrong (Score:5, Funny)
It will now be two people leaving the company!
Giant Mistake? (Score:3)
And it was all one giant mistake
I think it's more like snafu than mistake
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Giant Mistake? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Giant Mistake? (Score:5, Funny)
You accidentally what?
Re:Giant Mistake? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Giant Mistake? (Score:5, Insightful)
SNAFU is an apt description for doing anything "legal" via email or via the internet for that matter. Unfortunately it is becoming all too much the "norm" and billions are getting bilked from the systems every year. The free exchange of information is still all this is truly suitable for. Anything digital can be faked, intercepted, etc and after all this time there is no such thing as a "secure server", never has been, never will be, not functioning and connected to the internet at least (just to skip all the "disconnected, slagged, sealed in concrete and sunk to the bottom of the Marianas Trench type lines).
OK, everybody, ignore the ancient noise above and get back to making money off this stupidity!
Re:Giant Mistake? (Score:5, Insightful)
Situation Normal, All Fucked Up. Well, that's what I was taught it meant. And yes it is a SNAFU if your normal procedure for firing an employee is an e-mail. Man, that's fucked up...like being dumped over AOL Instant Messenger.
captcha: cunning
took me like 5 tries to get right....I knew "cumming" was wrong, but fuck those captchas can be hard to read
Re:Giant Mistake? (Score:5, Informative)
It was invented by Disney during WW2 to help train soldiers to fight nazis. yes, they were trained by cartoons.
Snafu was actually Private Snafu, who just fucked up everything he touched. Don't be like Private Snafu.
It does mean "Situation normal all fucked up"
Re:Giant Mistake? (Score:5, Informative)
It was invented by Disney during WW2 to help train soldiers to fight nazis.
That sounded facinating, but when I went to learn more I found that Wikipedia disagrees with you [wikipedia.org]. It cites several uses of the word prior to the creation of Private Snafu [wikipedia.org].
Still, it was interesting to find out about the Disney shorts. I must watch some on Youtube once my boss have left the building!
Re:Giant Mistake? (Score:5, Funny)
I must watch some on Youtube once my boss have left the building!
*bling* "You got mail!"
Re:Giant Mistake? (Score:4, Insightful)
Gandhi's feelings on the matter regardless, WWII was probably the last war that the American public, as a whole, felt was worth fighting.
Re:Giant Mistake? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's two fuckups I see:
1) They send letters with legal weight via e-mail and this is accepted. That's just wrong.
2) They wrote the e-mail so impersonal, without attribution, that 1300 people could mistakenly think they've been let off.
What a shithole company.
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe ...Unless the guy they fired was in charge of sending out dismissals. This was his final (possibly intentional) mistake. :D
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Man, to be a fly on the wall when HR told him to fire himself via e-mail.
Then you can be fired from HR?
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Funny)
I hear they immediately sent out 1,299 apology emails.
Well, they certainly tried to, but in an ironic twist, the apology email only went to the 1 person they were originally intending to fire.
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Funny)
I think you mean 1,298.
Re: (Score:3)
If he made one too many off-by-one errors, does that mean he didn't make an error at all?
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
It will now be two people leaving the company!
In the immediate, yes. However I suspect dozens more will follow them upon realizing that the company endorses firing people via e-mail using a form letter. It's a universally bad sign when a company has streamlined it's firing process to that degree. I worked for a company where the phrase "is no longer with the Company" was so common I had to setup an Outlook filter to mark them read and remove them from my inbox. A high turnover rate is an unambiguous indicator of bad management.
Re: (Score:2)
I've received quite a few salesperson related 'no longer with the company' emails but never so many as want to create a filter. That's unreal!
Re:Wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Try dealing with Dell Business.
They keep reorganizing, firing, and promoting people that by the time the ink is dry on their business cards the extensions no longer work.
I'm not joking. I can go through any contact more than 6 months old and their phone number in their signature is dead. Emailing them entails a 24 hour turnaround time to get the new person assigned to your account to contact you.
Nice people, but very weird communication infrastructure.
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
If you read the article, you will see that nobody was fired. Someone was leaving the company, and they got a note reminding of them of contractual obligations, procedures to be followed, and a thanks for years of service. That person would have found nothing odd at all about receiving the note. It was the people who weren't expecting the note who assumed they were fired.
Re: (Score:3)
"That person would have found nothing odd at all about receiving the note."
Let's hope that many people used 'reply all' to vent their anger.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
"read the article..", sorry but what does that mean?
Do you mean to tell me the summery doesn't show the full picture of this story?
Re: (Score:2)
I didn't see anything explicitly claiming that the person was fired solely by e-mail (as opposed to being fired in person and getting the e-mail as an addendum), nor that the e-mail was a form letter.
I work for the software division of a CPA firm, and I'm told the CPA side routinely has a certain proportion of junior employees stick around for a few years to get experience and then leave to g
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Slow down there, champ. Despite TFA being headlined "[FULL TEXT]", the full contents of the email doesn't appear in the article.
The link to Reuters [reuters.com] in the article doesn't either, but contains the following statement from Aviva's spokesman: "An email which was intended for a member of staff who was leaving today was accidentally sent to all Aviva Investors staff worldwide."
In other words, the intended recipient was well aware he/she was leaving, not even necessarily fired, and a form letter is used to lay out information outgoing staff need to be aware of. Worth a giggle at how for a moment it might have looked like all the staff had received a surprise sacking, but not really an excuse to get out your pet grievance about large organisational structures.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
People don't need an excuse to gripe, just an opportunity.
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Funny)
People don't need an excuse to gripe, just an opportunity.
God tell me about it? Give anyone a chance and they start bitching about the crap people do, it's so fucked up. Swear to god people just love to bitch about every fucking thing, no one can keep their stupid mouth shut.
god damn bitchers...
Re: (Score:3)
depends a lot on the status of the employee. A high turnover at the 3 month point just means you're trying to only retain the best. A high turnover at the 13 year points means you're trying to dodge paying senior employees senior rates.
Re:Wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Because it would be much better to rewrite from scratch each time the instructions to people whose contract has expired, have resigned, or have been "let go".
Rather than covering all the bases once and updating when policies change. After all leaving stuff out by mistake is much better than reusing a document.
And when you employ a new person have the system administrators team just do it from memory too. So what if they miss a step once or twice or put someone in the wrong group much better to be personal than actually follow a well thought out and pre-written procedure.
Re:Wrong (Score:4, Funny)
Good, Let's start from you :D
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it also means the company has no idea who to hire and keeps hiring morons.
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Morons who, in turn, send form letter emails firing all of the other morons. Where's the problem?
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Dark Helmet: Careful you idiot! I said across her nose, not up it!
Laser Gunner: Sorry sir! I'm doing my best!
Dark Helmet: Who made that man a gunner?
Major Asshole: I did sir. He's my cousin.
Dark Helmet: Who is he?
Colonel Sandurz: He's an asshole sir.
Dark Helmet: I know that! What's his name?
Colonel Sandurz: That is his name sir. Asshole, Major Asshole!
Dark Helmet: And his cousin?
Colonel Sandurz: He's an asshole too sir. Gunner's mate First Class Philip Asshole!
Dark Helmet: How many asholes do we have on this ship, anyway?
[Entire bridge crew stands up and raises a hand]
Entire Bridge Crew: Yo!
Dark Helmet: I knew it. I'm surrounded by assholes!
[Dark Helmet pulls his face shield down]
Dark Helmet: Keep firing, assholes!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Funny)
There are always unproductive employees.
No lie. At my company, about half of the employees have below average productivity.
Re: (Score:3)
Depending on your data set median may be a more valid average than mean.
e.g. housing prices or income.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
except for the cases that it is.
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
average != median. Woosh !
That is incorrect. The median is most certainly a type of average. The mean is another type of average, and the mode is yet another type of average. Most of the time, when people say "average", they are referring to the mean, but all three of those are averages.
In addition, it's generally a good assumption that productivity at a company will follow a normal distribution, in which case the median and the mean have the same value.
Re: (Score:3)
In addition, it's generally a good assumption that productivity at a company will follow a normal distribution, in which case the median and the mean have the same value.
No, not at my company. We're all above average!
Re: (Score:3)
if you call someone modal they are either confused or very unhappy about it.
I call my girlfriend modal since, when she calls or comes by, I have to stop everything else I'm doing until she's finished with me.
whoosh yourself, smug ass (Score:3)
Average can mean any of median, mode, or mean (geometric, harmonic, arithmetic).
If you want to be precise and unambiguous, don't use the word.
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Funny)
At my company we employ one guy to sit around and do nothing.
We do too. We call him the CEO.
Hold on a second, I just got an email; I'll be right back.
Re:Wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Among other things, a form letter suggests laziness on the part of managers.
There is such a thing as competent management, and much of the work of a competent manager is assessing the abilities, potential, and morale of individual members of the team. Firing people by form letter suggests that the managers aren't doing that assessment. They're likely hiring people, then ignoring them, and if they're ignoring them, they can't distinguish between a useless team member and an underutilized team member with great potential.
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more a matter of basic human decency. They're still people. They're still your employees. Most people will interpret this as a complete lack of respect, and many of them will look for a company that treats them as human beings rather than machines and an email address.
Re: (Score:3)
Yes lets fire everyone who has made a mistake.
Everybody needs to be perfect an never make a mistake, any mistakes will cause termination, and then a stigma will be attached to you so you can never work again. Who cares that that mistake taught you an important lesson and you will never make the same mistake again, who cares about your previous years of excellent service. You made a mistake and now you are fired, doomed to live off of the streets as an outcast, your crime, emailing the company not the indivi
Re: (Score:3)
Tacky (Score:5, Funny)
Those responsible should be sacked!
Re: (Score:2)
The people responsible for writing email to sacked persons have been sacked.
moral of the story (Score:3, Insightful)
have the fucking balls to fire someone in person.
Re:moral of the story (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody was fired. RTFA. It was nothing more than a final note to a person who was leaving the company.
Re:moral of the story (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, TFA is titled "Aviva Investors Accidentally Fires Entire Company Via Email [FULL TEXT]." But, TFA links to another article as its source [thenextweb.com]. But that source isn't the origin of the story either. It came from Reuters [reuters.com]. Honestly, if you're submitting a story to a news aggregator like Slashdot, take the time to send a link for the ORIGINAL story...
Re: (Score:3)
Which in turn would remove the excuse so many of us have to not RTFA. And if people started reading TFA, slashdot as we know it would be over!
Happiness (Score:2)
I am sure the employees were really happy when they heard that they weren't fired after all (well, except the guy who was fired).
Re:Happiness (Score:5, Funny)
That would be the worst.
First email: You're fired!
Second email: Oops. It was all a mistake. Only one person was supposed to be fired.
Third email: That person is you.
Re:Happiness (Score:5, Funny)
I was thinking first email: You're fired
Second emaol: Can someone fix the email?
Third email: Where is everyone? Can someone please fix the email?
Re:Happiness (Score:5, Funny)
That would be the worst.
First email: You're fired!
Oh, yah? Well screw you all! I never liked this company and pissed in the coffee daily. And Mr. CEO, I am banging your wife.
Second email: Oops. It was all a mistake. Only one person was supposed to be fired.
Uh....
Third email: That person is you.
Damn...
Unlikely... (Score:3)
OK, he's banging my wife but:
I know he's doing it and
She can't complain about me banging my PA
And he'll do what he's told...all in all, a win/win situation.
I wonder (Score:5, Funny)
The intended recipient... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The intended recipient... (Score:5, Insightful)
Amateur politicians still think they can make a difference, and might even try.
Re:The intended recipient... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, this country was built by rich and educated local leaders (elites, if you will), who were the doctors and lawyers of the country. They already had the respect and trust of the population, seeing as they were the aristocracy of the time.
While many were amateur politicians, the truth was that many had served in local pre-existing legislatures and were sent as senators or ran for higher office.
Yet more proof that the Tea party crowd has no grasp of actual history (though they have a romanticized fictional version).
Re: (Score:3)
Because the skill that the career politicians have developed is taking money from powerful interests and suckering voters? Who wouldn't want their leadership less competent at that?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:The intended recipient... (Score:4)
We thought that in California. It just makes them start looking to their next job that much sooner. The path goes like something this:
1. City council (maybe county board of supervisors)
2. Minor statewide elected position (such as Board of Equalization)
3. Assembly or Senate
4. Senate or Assembly (whichever one they didn't do in Step 3)
5. Large city mayor
6. Congress or political appointment
They pretty much just bounce around, dragging their incompetence with them. When they stick around in one spot, there's an institutional knowledge that comes with it, which includes knowing that they're going to have to get along with the other people around them for a long time. I'd rather the fiefdoms that come with being in the Assembly or House for 30 years than them constantly trying to make a name for themselves in the current position so they have a better shot at the next position.
Re: (Score:3)
That would be just fine, as long as the government isn't allowed to interact with those people either.
Re:The intended recipient... (Score:4, Insightful)
As a socialist, I want state authority to be a direct expression of popular will. A state authority that is not an expression of popular will is not a state authority I want to "do more".
I'd rather Congress did more, if the "more" is understood to mean things like redistributing wealth through progressive taxation, providing desirable social services, and defending civil liberties. I'd rather it did less, if the "less" is understood to mean things like financing invasions and occupations, concentrating wealth through regressive taxation and subsidies to corporations, and undermining civil liberties.
The US Congress, in its present form -- i.e., the entire complex of legislators, staff, party functionaries, lobbyists, donors, PACs, and so on -- is so tied to the interests of the 1%, that it's starting to fail to even maintain the illusion of balancing competing social interests. It is not a direct expression of the popular will.
How to make it a more direct expression of the popular will, or alternately, how to construct a form of government that is, is no small question. But to begin with, I believe it's necessary to avoid the trap of accepting the idea that bigger or smaller government is, in itself, the issue, or even a meaningful question.
Didn't they put the person's name on it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Didn't they put the person's name on it? (Score:5, Funny)
They did, but he had recently changed his name to Robert; staff; management; everyone; Tables
Re: (Score:2)
ahh, little bobby tables had a job!
Re: (Score:3)
Not anymore.
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Re: (Score:3)
Moral of the story (Score:5, Funny)
Never hire an employee named "allstaff".
Re: (Score:2)
I'll be unfirable
Re:Moral of the story (Score:5, Funny)
I worked for a company whose very first paying customer was named Richard Test. Poor Mr. Test had his account deleted by well-meaning and fastidious secretaries several times. (We'd have just renumbered his account if that ID wasn't used in a zillion other systems.)
New Email System (Score:2)
C'mon Slashdot.. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
RTFA (Score:2)
The person wasn't fired. It seems to be a typical "last day" e-mail given to anyone leaving voluntarily.
Not the first time (Score:5, Funny)
This is not the first time that Alan 'Call me Al' Staff has caused this problem.
Some mistakes can come back and haunt (Score:2)
HR Departments (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a job that nobody with a brain ever wanted to do. Actually, it's a job that nobody ever wanted to do. Nobody ever grows up wanting to work in HR. The only people who do work in HR, are those who have failed. And they bear a grudge.
Which explains why their inhumanity creates situations like this one, and so many similar situations. With the technology currently available, real managers can manage. HR staff need to be fired. All of them, everywhere. The world never really needed them in the first place, but there's no justification for having them now.
The first corporation that has the insight to fire all its HR people will wipe the floor with its competition within 5 years. They will have all the advantages of a small business, mixed with the power of a corporation. And they will have MUCH happier, more productive, employees.
Re:HR Departments (Score:4, Informative)
The first corporation that has the insight to fire all its HR people will wipe the floor with its competition within 5 years. They will have all the advantages of a small business, mixed with the power of a corporation. And they will have MUCH happier, more productive, employees.
I agree, until of course, someone critical leaves and they discover "Opps, we didn't have a non-compete or even a non-solicit signed by them." Or "We're being sued because some manager violated a bunch of employment laws during the hiring process." That person we just hired as a driver? It would have been nice to know he had six DUIs before we gave him the keys to one of out trucks.
no HR does not = no driver or other checks (Score:3)
no HR does not = no driver or other checks.
It's the manager / team lead who should be doing the hiring / firing. And some HR stuff can be done by the back office or having HR not control hiring
I'm not kidding, boss (Score:2)
I really did just change my name to Majordomo.
happens all the time (Score:5, Interesting)
I was an administrator for a medium size tech company in the early nineties, and we got this all the time. The problem was not with the technically inept, but with the engineers, who would commonly send emails with:
mail -s "some subject line text" user_name (left_arrow) textfile
This was the same company that had a homegrown script to delete a user from the system. (Not written, maintained or owned by my team, I hasten to say.) The script had inadequate error checking, and if an operator hit carriage return without entering a user name, the script would delete the entire home directory structure on several machines. It kept us busy.
I got fired by mistake once (Score:5, Interesting)
It happened when I was in support. I couldn't clock in. A told the manager about it and she was like, "maybe you got fired". We both had a good laugh about it because we were all on good terms. No mass layoffs were expected, this was the go-go 90s. Next day--still can't clock in. Manager is more serious. "I'll have to look into this". Sure enough, somebody fat-fingered me off the payroll.
It was actually a good thing--I got paid for my accumulated vacation hours. They couldn't figure out how to charge them back to vacation. They "re-hired" me and I got money. The vacation hours started accumulating from zero; but I had just taken a few days so I didn't mind saving up again. The money came in handy.
The second snafu... (Score:4, Funny)
The second snafu is when 500 of those people did a Reply-All saying "sod off wankers!"
Re: (Score:3)
Bah. In any large organization, there is bound to be one person who doesn't understand the 'Reply to All' button, no matter how many Sunday afternoons you have put aside to teach them the basics of emailing. Said person should be fired (and the IT department, no doubt, would cheer you on as you did it).