5 ms·
I had a experience like this, once. Luckily it was less visible, but I felt like a fool all the same. I came out as trans and changed my name last year, and wi
by thelopa 5y ago
I had a experience like this, once. Luckily it was less visible, but I felt like a fool all the same.
I came out as trans and changed my name last year, and with the name change I set up a new email alias for work. Then I set up automation to send out a gentle reminder email about the change for people who emailed my old alias. It worked fantastically for a few months… right up until the point that (due to a series of individually innocent events) the automation ended up running across the entirety of my 7 years worth of inbox. Everyone who had mailed me over the 7 years prior to the name change started getting the reminder email. One reminder for each email they had sent me. The worst part is that due to a bug in the email automation stuff, emails sent by the automation weren’t preserved in my sent box. So I don’t even know how many people I spammed. If I had to guess, I sent dozens of emails to the CEO and other execs, hundreds to my director, and thousands to people who worked closely with me over the years.
I learned a valuable lesson that day.
- squeegmeister 5y agoOuch
- snarkypixel 5y agoWhat was the valuable lesson? :p
- throwawayboise 5y agoDon't write your own email auto-responders?
- thelopa 5y agoYou joke, but there is a profound truth to this. Don’t reinvent the wheel. To be fair, it’s not like I wrote any real code for my auto-responder. I used a slightly janky mail tool that could, if held just right, be used to set up an auto-responder. I should have looked for something a bit more bulletproof and focused, but I wanted to play with this specific tool and see what I could make it do. Mostly, I’m kicking myself for not thinking to put safeguards in. Dependencies can fail in unexpected ways, and I should have set up my auto-responder to be a bit more defensive.
- donbrae 5y agoI did similar in Mac Mail a few years ago: it caused an out-of-office reply to be sent to every email I’d ever sent going back years. I was surprised Mail allowed for this scenario. Needless to say, my holiday got off to a stressful start!
- buu700 5y agoDon't transition unless you're able to budget for a software QA contractor.
- toomanyducks 5y agoI've been laughing at myself for like two years now about how awkwardly I came out, and only now do i realize how fortunate i am that i didn't try to automate it. Thank you very much
- Gary_Boooossy 5y agoDo you really share these things in a professional context? What country was this in?
- frandroid 5y agoYou're getting downvoted to hell, but I'm going to respond anyway. The parent poster here is fully transitioning their gender. They're not cross-dressing at night, they're not "closeted trans"--they're changing their identity for their whole life, in all contexts--personal, professional, etc. Furthermore, they don't want to be known by their old identity anymore--in the parlance, that's called a deadname. So they're informing people of that happening, of who they're identifying as from now on.
- Gary_Boooossy 5y agoAt least I'm only being downvoted there.
- floatingatoll 5y agoIt’s often considered professional courtesy to let people know when a property that matters to 99% of humanity (name and gender) changes permanently. Everyone takes a different approach. There are upsides and downsides to the “email autoresponder” method, but it’s certainly an acceptable option in local instances of context.
- thelopa 5y agoIt turns out, people generally don’t change the terms of address they use for you unless you ask them to!
- floatingatoll 5y agoThere are certain predictable exceptions, like when the physical changes reach a threshold of severe mismatch versus your old name and they get uncomfortable and figure it out (or ask :)
- floatingatoll 5y agoOh no
- mkr-hn 5y agoI thought I was done with queer tragedy stories, but I could read more of this subgenre.