“NOBODY PANIC!!!!”
[Editorial Note: I wrote this a couple of months ago, but just decided to publish it. To be honest, I kinda forgot about it, which, after you read it, will be a bit ironic. See end note for more retrospection]
One of my sons and I occasioinally say this to one another [waving our hands in the air while simulating a panicked scream]. It comes from a time my boss did this as a metaphorical demonstration for the actions of a group of people we were discussing. (My son was there because he had come to walk home with me. He thought it was hilarious)
People generally see me as a calm, rational person. Diploamaic. Tactful. Composed.
Today I had a full blown, unhinged, self-eviscerating panic session. Panic, combined with self-directed rage for added affect. I thought I had done something really stupid. Not wrong (immoral or unethical). Not deadly or dangerous. Just stupid. A mistake. The all too human kind that seem to really get me the most when I’m the one who makes it.
It was the kind of mistake that could have made a mess of things with some personal and professional contacts (that I REALLY REALLY want to see me as a competent professional at the moment). This would do the opposite. I was convinced.
The details of the gaffe aren’t all that interesting, perhaps. It’s the mental and emotional afermath that I’m sorting out. It involved an email to a group that I meant to send as a BCC (blind copy, so the recipients weren’t known to one another). The conent of the message was fine. It was exactly what I wanted to say. The problem was in the way I put the group into the “Reply To:” field instead of the “bcc:” field. So, the way I sent it, anyone who replied to the message would be replying to the entire goup. Sixty people.
I panicked.
When I say I panicked, I don’t mean I got anxious. I screamed at myself, inside myself and audibly, loudly. (There was no one around at the moment.) I used all manor of horrible derrgatory words to describe myslef. I assumed that all the people who received this message and replied, hence suffering the spamathon that would ensue, of course, would think as horribly of me as I was thinking of myself in that very moment.
This was the kind of error — a lapse of detail awareness that causes confusion and inconvenience — that fills professional communicators like me with dread.
I set about irrationally trying to make it not happen. Thinking of ways to mitigate the damage. Unsend? Nope. Too late. Slowly — as it would turn out, not slowly enough — I came to the conclusion that the only thing to do was send out another message. Own my shame. Repent. Cast myself upon the mercy of others. I composed and sent a second me culpa message that apologized for the huge mistake I had just made.
Only I hadn’t.
My original message did include all those people in the reply field. But it was sent to … nobody. No email was in the send field. The email server simply dumped it. (It probably rolled its eyes and thought, “Pffft. Incompetent. Can’t even put an address in the ‘To:’ box.)
Of course, due to my continued state of panic and shame, I realized this fact after I sent the apology message. So, I had just apologized for potentially creating an inconvenience and owning up to a mistake that not one single person in the group I was adressing had any comprehension I had made. Not until I just told them I made it (even though I hadn’t).
Granted, awkwardly apologizing for an inconvenience you did not create is better than creating it and having to apologize for it. But I could have avoided the extraneous awkward apology and retained my desired facade of deft communicator if I had not panicked.
Now my embarrassment has been downgraded to ‘bumbler’ for clumsily issuing apologies that draw attention to lapses in detail orientation that didn’t happen, rather than ‘OMG, YOU DID WHAT!?!? YOU’RE RUINED. RUINED I SAY!!”
Yes. I know that’s irrational. That’s what panic is typically, though. The rush of rationality moving swiftly out of reach.
I’m not sure how to avoid panicking. In those moments, panic seems to be the rational response, not its opposite.
I suppose the best I can do is to learn from my mistakes. Even the one’s I didn’t make.
[End Note: Nothing bad happened. Not even one person said, “what was that all about?” I got a few kind replies that were to the point of the original intent (not about my gaffe). I didn’t get as many as I thought I would, but I can’t draw a line from my mistake to that. So, panic really isn’t worth it. But you probably knew that.]
