Friday Rant

Does everyone have people like this in their lives?

I'm talking about the person who makes an irritating but by no mean heinous mistake, and when it's pointed out to them, they can't just say "oops" or "yeah, that was a mistake, sorry for the inconvenience", they have to make up a not-even-believable lie to explain how they were right all along and didn't make a mistake. Such as "no, I didn't mistakenly include you on the distribution list of that threatening email, I 'blank' cc'd you, so you'd know to do something about it". So not only does this person not know that it's blind cc, not "blank", this person also does not know that Outlook does not include someone who is blind cc'd in the distribution list, that's why it's a blind cc.

This person also does not know that blind cc's are somewhere in the range of awkward to rude, depending. If you want to send a third party a copy of an email without the email's original recipient knowing about it, you don't blind cc them (and run the risk of the blind recipient using "Reply All" and outing you), you go back to your Sent box and then forward the email to the third party with a note of explanation of why you wanted the third party to see it.

So what to do with people who can't acknowledge a mistake and don't realize that they are incompetent liars? It's tempting to point out the mistakes in the lies, too, but if the person's a supervisor (or a parent), that's not likely to be politically correct.

Maybe this is one of the reasons blogs are so popular.