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This story was printed from silicon.com, located at http://www.silicon.com/

Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/research/specialreports/digitalblunders2/0,39024989,10005808,00.htm

Email the Achilles heel of blundering users
And it afflicts more than half of us...

By Will Sturgeon

Published: Monday 01 September 2003

A startling 52 per cent of us admit to having committed a Digital Blunder in our lives, with email the most common cause of tech-related embarrassment.

Wrongly addressing emails, hitting reply when you meant to forward or sending an SMS to the wrong name in your mobile's phonebook are among the most common blunders. A simple error such as a typo can also be a cause of upset.

Take this example from one silicon.com reader. "I was having a relationship with the widowed step-father of my best friend, however, she didn't know about this. One morning, after we'd been out, I tapped out a text to him detailing our evening so that if we were quizzed we'd have the same story. She thought we were playing chess but in fact we had a far livelier evening after a few beers! In the text I made reference to my best friend and what we were going to say if asked. But you've guessed it, when I hit "send" I picked the wrong name off of the list and sent it to the friend by mistake."

And another reader made this admission: "As a systems admin I often send out emails to users to advise of server outages that are planned. One day I chose to end an email with 'Sorry for any inconvenience caused'.

Unfortunately my spelling is atrociously bad and 'inconvenience' was spelled so badly that the spellchecker thought I was trying to spell 'incontinence'. Not paying attention closely enough I didn't read the suggestions that it was giving me, thinking it would pick the one I meant. Therefore the message ended 'Sorry for the incontinence'."

Of those of us who have committed a Digital Blunder 83 per cent did so with an email. Meanwhile mobile phones have been the undoing of 39 per cent of blundering respondents to a silicon.com survey.

The trusted and time-honoured landline has still tripped up 12 per cent of respondents while five per cent have sent a fax in error.