I’ve had many “OMG You Must read this” emails sent to me before - some funny, most pretty boring.

This, however is one of the kickers, and it’s a graphic reason why you should always be careful about sending nasty emails - to other staff, but also especially to your customers.

I’ve reformatted the emails, so it reads better on the web. Email addresses have been removed, but I’ve still got the original sitting here.

From: Steve Hausman
To: ‘Events Team’
Sent: Wednesday, November 15, 2006 4:06 PM
Subject: RE: Quote #00002417; from The Great Marquee Company Ltd.
Hi Klaus

Paula and I went and viewed your marquee setup at Devonport the other weekend and unfortunately we did not like it.
So this is just to let you know we will not require your services on 7 April 2007.

Thanks for your assistance and we are sorry that it turned out this way although we are glad we looked at the marquee prior to booking as that would have been a huge disappointment.

Regards  
Steve Hausman

That’s not so bad - a bit of a p.o’d customer, but, hey, it happens.

This response is the real killer though, from The Great Marquee Company.

From: Events Team
Sent: Wednesday, 15 November 2006 6:30 p..m.
To: Steve Hausman
Subject: Thank You From The Great Marquee Company

Hi Steve,
Thanks for your reply. Your wedding sounded cheap, nasty and tacky anyway, so we only ever considered you time wasters.

Our marquees are for upper class clients which unfortunately you are not. Why don’t you stay within your class level and buy something from payless plastics instead.

Kindest Regards
Katrina
Office Manager
The Great Marquee Company

And this, ladies and gentlemen - demonstrates exactly why you shouldn’t be responding to customer emails when you’re having an off day.

In the traditional nature of these emails - everyone forwards on the email, leaving intact the headers. For fun, I started counting people in the “To” and “CC” lines, but gave up at 150, about 1/3 of the way.

Klaus Jorgensen, of The Great Marquee Company put a statement on their website apologising for the gaff.

The Great Marquee Company was recently involved in one of the fastest spreading internet stories of the year.  Completely against our own philosophy of going to every effort for our customers, one of our people sent a very inappropriate message following a customer decision not to use our product.
[...]
We certainly regret the exchange and have apologised to the customer. We are also confident that this will never happen again.

For those using Outlook, Paul Stovell gives a good bit of advice on turning off the “Send immediately when connected” option.  Although, this won’t save Katrina, who, according to The Register, is the CEO’s Wife and was promptly fired.

This was also in the NZ Herald last week, along with just about everyone else.