Digital Blunders: Caution - may cause offence

Since launching our Digital Blunders special report we've been inundated with your email and SMS howlers. Here are four of the best we've received this week - all of which might be likely to cause offence... so don't say you haven't been warned.

Corporate 'casting couch' accusations...
"While at my last company one of my mates was promoted, and an email was sent around congratulating him by his director, saying that he had "Impressed the judges".

I sent a reply to my friend saying that the main criterion for promotion in his dept was dropping his trousers, bending over a table, and allowing his director to perform various sexual acts on him.

But a second or two after hitting send I realised I had actually just replied to his director.

I left the company soon afterwards…"

Gay porn confusion...
"A few years ago a colleague was going to be best man at his friend's wedding and asked if I would do a bit of image manipulation for him - combining a picture of a naked man with a picture of his friend to comic effect. I'd been known to fiddle around with paintshop pro in the past so I said I'd give it a shot. A few nights later I produced the image and my colleague went away a happy man...

Some months later another colleague asked me to recommend a package for an image manipulation project of his own. I told him about my previous success with paintshop pro and the job I'd done for my other colleague. He asked if I could send over the images that I'd done so he could see my work, I told him I'd send it to his hotmail address, to avoid the beady eyes of our technical support department. Unfortunately I have a really poor memory, and it wasn't until a few weeks later that I remembered his request, and sent the images over...

However, he'd not been around a computer for a few days and had asked his girlfriend to access his hotmail account and print off his emails - not expecting mine to be among them as he thought I'd forgotten completely. His girlfriend did this for him - just going through hitting open and print, without looking at the content. But then she left them on the printer for a while. A few minutes later her irate boss dropped a pile of paper on her desk and said "You ought to be more careful with things like this!"

So later on my colleague had received an angry phone call from his girlfriend, complaining about his gay porn collection. I confessed and fortunately he saw the funny side of it but I'm not so sure about his girlfriend or her boss."

A classic typo...
"A client was asking for advice about backing up her PC on a separate media to her primary disk as the computer was critical to her business. I suggested removable media such as CDR and ZIP but also said that she could look into having a "new hard dick inserted into one of her existing slots" - oops!

She rang me and said that although this sounded like an interesting idea she was not sure how it was going to help her data storage requirements!"

Two-timer brought down to earth...
"A couple of weeks ago I went up to Manchester for the Manchester carnival. In the evening, I went out with my mates to a club and in there was a lovely blonde. I got on to doing my thing, and at the end of the night we exchanged phone numbers and I invited her to come down to London for the Notting Hill carnival.

What I didn't tell her was that I have also been seeing another lady in London.

One evening I got back from work and the London girl phoned up for a chat. During the conversation I decided to text the Northern lass - with quite a saucy SMS. BUT who did I select from my phone address book to send the text to? You guessed it. The London girl.

I won't go into details of what happened next but it would be along long time before I sent explicit texts to anyone from my mobile.

Keep them coming. Email editorial@silicon.com