"For want of a nail...," or "Why you should take care with e-mail"

My daughter’s band teacher says he has only one rule for his students: “Use your head.”

Eminently sensible advice, really. So much pain can be avoided by applying that little maxim to everything in life, little or big. “Use your head.”

Just ask Katrina Jorgensen if she regrets not using her head before pressing the Send button on one little e-mail message.

Jorgensen is—or rather was—an employee of The Great Marquee Company of New Zealand. After a couple considered and then rejected having The Great Marquee Company supply a marquee for their wedding, Jorgensen fired off an archetypical sour-grapes e-mail message that said their wedding plans were “cheap, nasty and tacky,” and that the firm’s marquees were intended for “upper class clients,” not clients like them.

E-mail may offer many things, but it absolutely does not guarantee that a private message will stay private. Jorgensen’s little snit didn’t stay private (as this story from the New Zealand Herald shows), and it had a daisy-cutter impact on her reputation, and that of The Great Marquee Company.

So, before you press “Send,” use your head! 

(Hat tip to Paulo.)