Quote Of The Week: Email Miscommunication

Quote

Thursday morning at the office started with an email from the HR department:

To: All
Subject: Mikka is dead…
His body is in the HR office for anyone who would like to say good bye.

The news that one of my co-workers had died came as a bit of a shock but not as shocking as the fact that the email seemed to be suggesting that his body had been laid out on an office desk for everyone see. Where his grieving parents also going to swing by the office? Were they going to bury him in the back garden?

A short while later another email was sent all:

To: All
Subject: RE: Mikka is dead…
Mikka is the office cat, not a human.

Something tells me I was not the only one who got confused.

Stuart

Stuart is an accident prone Englishman who has been living in the Netherlands since 2001. Even his move to the country was an unintentional accident, the result of replying to a cryptic job advertisement he found one day in a local British magazine. Since then he has learned to love the Dutch (so much so that he married one of them) and now calls the country home. He started the blog Invading Holland in 2006 as a place to share his strange stories of language misunderstandings, cultural confusions and his own accident prone nature.

20 Responses

  1. kiki says:

    Erm… You know I’m looking for a job, right?
    So, when your company decides it’s time to get someone with some communications skills in their HR department, let me know.

    That being said, poor puss. I hope he’s living it up in Kitty Heaven.

  2. Jules says:

    Poor kitty!

    But still, that would have been weird, to have a body laid out–at his desk, hand on a slowly cooling mug of coffee…

  3. Breigh says:

    Even for a cat, it’d be weird. I really don’t do dead things / people -at all-

  4. John says:

    You had me there for a minute. I can imagine your shock, and, later, relief (if that’s the right word).

  5. French Bean says:

    o_O”

    That is indeed quite disturbing, cat or not.

  6. julia says:

    Hilarious – and I like Jules’ comment.

  7. Marianne says:

    That’s brilliant, especially the idea that anyone would want to go and pay their last respects.

  8. dragonlady says:

    Do you have a human called Mikka working there. What did he/she think when they heard that they were dead.
    When I heard that it was the office cat I had visions of a line of office mice all standing with there heads bowed.

  9. Invader Stu says:

    kiki – For a moment there, when I had just read the first line, I thought you were offering to be the new office kitty.

    Jules – …and a schedules as a grave stone.

    Breigh – Agreed.

    John – They had the whole office for a minute.

    French Bean – That thought had crossed my mind too.

    Julia – Thanks :)

    Marianne – There actually was a funeral in the garden as well.

    Dragonlady – We used to have someone in the office with the same name but he left a few months before.
    I would have liked to see the mice paying their last respects to their old enemy.

  10. Aledys Ver says:

    I can picture all of you with shocked faces staring at your pc screens trying to figure out if you were reading a joke or what! :D

  11. kiki says:

    I would LOVE a job as an office kitty! I’d sit on desks and get stroked and fed tidbits. Wait – that’s pretty much what happens at home.

  12. Heather says:

    It is such a shame that the whole thing wasn’t done via GoogleWave…it would have been great to see how that all played out.

  13. Invader Stu says:

    Aledys Ver – I think that is pretty much what it was like.

    Kiki – You’re a kitty at home?

    Heather – It would have been a much longer post if it had been as well :p

  14. Anneke says:

    Oh no! Poor cat! I hope you attended the funeral, as you ought! I’d have paid my respects had I known!

    (on a sidenote, a housemate of mine told me he did some test gaming at your company :) )

  15. Wendi says:

    Oh, that’s funny. I forgot that about Amsterdam–cats everywhere. Hopefully mostly living ones.

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