Oh well. I had a good run. I have been really careful over the years with avoiding the “reply all by accident” mistake that has created so much comedy and pain to others. I am not sure how I have avoided it so well – in part I am careful – but in part clearly just lucky. And I have witnessed some pretty pretty funny reply all mistakes as I am sure have most people out there. The funniest was one by well known evolutionary biologist who made a bit of a faux pas in replying to a message sent to the evoldir mailing list in the early 1990s. After witnessing what happened in particular with that one, I did become more careful with replying.
So then yesterday, while at Stanford for an Evolutionary Genomics Symposium, I was tweeting and friendfeeding the talks (will post notes in a little while) and I was doing this all on my iPhone. I like the iPhone, but typing notes on it, and looking up Urls of papers, and copying and pasting things to Friendfeed or twitter, is not that easy. But I was trying to keep up. And I logged in to my gmail to look up the schedule, and saw an email message from
Jim Bristow the Deputy Director of the Joint Genome Institute that I had meant to respond to earlier.
In his email Jim requested, quite reasonably, that people that have projects that are done in collaboration with (or entirely by) the Joint Genome Institute, add a little statement to their Acknowledgements in their publications, regarding the funding for the JGI.
We had had a paper come out Friday supported by DOE and done in part at the JGI, and I looked at the paper on the PLoS One site and we had the right acknowledgement in our paper, thanks to a suggestion from
David Gilbert who handles Public Affairs at the JGI.
So I wrote a little email response to Bristow’s email. My email was brief:
All sounds pretty boring right? That was until I clicked send, which sent the email, somehow, to all the people on the DOE mailing list – basically all people that have ever worked with JGI. And if you reread my message, it sounds like I am bragging “did it right” about how great our paper was.
I have already gotten three responses, all thinking I meant that our paper was “right”.
So here is my question for everyone. What do I do now? Do I send another message to all saying “Oops – I did not mean to send that to everyone and that I was not bragging about our paper? Or do I lie low and let it blow over?
Jonathan Eisen's Lab 