The 6 Most Disastrous Uses of Work Email Ever

They say you should never write anything in an email that you don't want to see on the front page of the New York Times. And while you may shrug and ask why in the world the Times would print your email about how drunk you got last night, well, you'd be surprised.

These guys found out the hard way.

Peter Chung's future couldn't have been brighter. After graduating from Princeton he landed a sweet job with The Carlyle Group, complete with a fancy apartment. Chung soon found himself tempted by the money, women and fast lane existence that apparently exists in Korea for young investment bankers.

Investment banking in America.

Investment banking in Korea.

Showing off the virtues instilled by his expensive education, 2 weeks after landing his new gig Peter was emailing his friends about his ambitious plans for the future:

" ....CHUNG is going to fuck every hot chick in Korea over the next 2 years (5 down, 1,000,000,000 left to go) the second bedroom is for my harem of chickies...I know I was a stud in NYC but I pretty much get about, on average, 5-8 phone numbers a night and at least 3 hot chicks that say that they want to go home with me every night I go out."

It's all about Seoul.

We're not sure where he got the billion hot chicks from. Either Chung was bad at math or he had no real standards when it came to women. In any event, he had set the bar high for himself and needed some help from his friends back home:

"Oh, by the way, someone's gotta start fedexing me boxes of domes, I brought out about 40 but I think I'll run out of them by Saturday."

We suspect this was not due to any real shortage of "domes" (from the context we assume he means wiener covers) in Korea, but rather to hammer the point home that he was getting some, but in a responsible manner. He might have also been embarrassed to ask his mother to send him condoms in with her usual care package of cookies and socks.

Chung apparently took things a little too far when he boasted about how everyone in the industry was kissing his ass:

"...I have bankers calling me everyday with opportunities and they pretty much cater to my every whim - you know (golfing events, lavish dinners, a night out clubbing)"

A night out clubbing? With bankers? Awesome!

The Fallout:

We're not sure what was worse, Peter writing the email in the first place, deciding to send said email from his work account or his choice of friends to send the email to. The result was the email being forwarded to a whole lot of people in the investment banking industry.

Within days, Chung was forced to resign in disgrace, probably with a case of crabs to boot. Thus the Sex King of Korea's reign ended shortly after it began, and his plan to fuck every beautiful woman in the country was likely never realized.

Richard Phillips was a senior associate with the biggest law firm in London (Baker & McKenzie) and as such, was under a lot of pressure to be an even bigger dick than a normal lawyer.

So when a fifty year-old secretary and mother of two accidentally spilled some ketchup on his pants, he saw the perfect opportunity to pull the biggest dick move in the history of the firm by sending her this email:

"Hi Jenny, I went to a dry cleaners at lunch and they said it would cost $4 to remove the ketchup stains. If you could let me have the cash today, that would be much appreciated. Thanks Richard."

Of course, we can't read Richard's mind, so maybe he had some great reason as to why, based on an accident, he had to demand financial restitution from a secretary making a fraction of his six-figure salary. Maybe he suspected it wasn't an accident? Or worse, that it wasn't ketchup.

Either way, when Jenny didn't respond fast enough for his liking he went to her desk a few days later and left her a note to collect the four bucks, without which he could obviously not make his mortgage and car payments.

As it turns out Jenny was a little slow to pony up the cash because her mom had gotten sick and died, which on the grand scale of things ranks slightly higher than paying some bullshit claim for dry cleaning. This explains why she was pissed when she came back to work and she decided to offer a reply:

"Obviously your financial need as a senior associate is greater than mine as a mere secretary. Having already spoken to and shown your email and Anne-Marie's note to various partners, lawyers and trainees in ECC&T and IP/IT, they kindly offered to do a collection to raise the $4"

We think she was being sarcastic. Also, she copied her message to a few hundred people in the office.

The Fallout:

Richard's pathetic attempt to get the money and Jenny's subsequent bitch slap response was forwarded to pretty much everyone in the city, and then it was loose on the internet for the whole world to see. Soon the law firm had to respond by investigating the incident (the investigation likely consisted of the partners at the firm asking Richard why he was such an asshole).

This little guy doesn't seem to mind the ketchup.

Eventually Richard resigned from the firm, claiming he wanted to take time off to study and not at all because he became the laughing stock of lawyers everywhere. It may not have worked out much better for Jenny, however, as she also took a leave of absence, indicating co-workers wouldn't deal with her after the incident. Probably not by email, anyway.

Claire was an employee of a British Internet provider back in 2000 who had a unique talent for finding and sleeping with total asses. At the time of the incident the latest loser she had found to date was a lawyer named Bradley Chait.

While at work one day Bradley decided to send a joke involving a certain male, sexual bodily fluid (note: WE'RE TALKING ABOUT SEMEN). This apparently was the kind of stuff that turned Claire on and she decided, in her own classy way, to give Bradley a bit of an ego boost by writing him the following:

"I hadn't swallowed in years but yours was yum and very good for me too! Apparently its a very good conditioner for your hair too...getting a funny picture in my head..."

This was obviously a Hallmark moment and that might have been the end of it, but Bradley wasn't the kind of guy to let such an honest and heartfelt sentiment go unnoticed. To make sure all his friends knew what an amazing stud he was, he decided to forward the email to his friends with a note:

"Now THAT'S a nice compliment from a lass, isn't it?"

"My friends need to know how good my semen is."

We can only hope that Bradley had enough sense to realize that he may have made a mistake when one of his friends wrote back telling him that he felt "honour bound" to forward the email on. Soon the world knew that Bradley tasted "yum" and that he was a dick. And also that his friends had a weird sense of "honour."

The Fallout:

Bradley and Claire quickly became internet famous, as web surfers everywhere were enthralled with the idea that somewhere in the world two people were having sex.

The website of the law firm where Bradley worked soon crashed from all the people trying to see what Bradley looked like.

This.

There was even some collateral damage as a website of a company that employed a completely different Claire Swire went from an average of 500 hits to over 70,000, confirming once again that even border line pornographic interests can drive Internet traffic like nothing else.

As for the two lovers, Bradley was suspended by his firm and Claire went into hiding, the shame of having once performed oral sex sure to stain her family for the next five generations.