Reply All
全員に返信
Marcus had promised himself that he would never again read a email before his second coffee.
Yet there it was, glowing on his screen, a message that someone had sent to all four hundred employees by mistake.
The subject line read simply, "Re: Re: Re: Fwd: quick question," which meant it had already survived a dozen careless forwards.
Had the sender paused for even a second, she might have noticed the little words "Reply All" waiting to ruin her morning.
She had not.
Instead, she had asked the entire building whether anyone knew where the good scissors had gone.
Within minutes, the replies began to arrive, each one somehow worse than the last.
"Could you please remove me from this ?" wrote a manager, that he had just added himself to it forever.
"I have never used those scissors," announced a man from accounting, as though defending himself in court.
Marcus had seen this movie before, and he knew exactly how it would end.
Someone would eventually reply-all to ask everyone to stop replying-all.
Sure enough, within the hour a senior director had done precisely that.
"Would everyone stop hitting Reply All," she wrote, hitting Reply All.
Marcus leaned back and admired the , glittering perfection of it.
He had spent nine years at this company, and in all that time nothing had really changed.
The tools had improved; the humans had not.
A younger colleague, Priya, appeared at his desk, looking genuinely .
"Should I say something?" she asked. "I feel like I should apologise."
"You didn't send it," Marcus reminded her gently. "You have done nothing wrong."
"But everyone's so angry," she said.
"They are not angry," he replied.
"They are delighted. This is the most exciting thing that has happened to them all year."
By lunchtime, the had grown to two hundred messages, and someone had started a betting pool on when it would finally stop.
Marcus, who had never once won an office competition, quietly placed his guess and closed the laptop.
He would not check it again until three o'clock, purely out of principle.
He lasted, by his own honest estimate, roughly four minutes.