There is often more than a twinge of embarrassment when an Email goes astray, and is received by the wrong person. Phil remembers an occasion when it nearly ended a career, but somehow, ironically, changed it for the better

One of the curses of IT is that it is no longer possible, at a swift glance, for a supervisor or manager in any office to see how productive his workforce is being. A conscientious employee, straining to complete his allotted tasks, can be seen staring hard at a screen and tapping away at his keyboard. By contrast, the idler who is passing the time on internet social, and auction, sites, or maintaining a complex love-life via email, can be seen staring hard at a screen and tapping away at his keyboard.

In our large IT department, Pedro was always busy, though it was somewhat difficult to list his actual achievements. He was a streetwise 'Systems Analyst' who was part of the departmental landscape. When he wasn't on the phone, or earnestly working through a huge email correspondence, he was striding around holding a file, and looking important. His desk was always piled high with paperwork and various abstruse UML diagrams. He had been there a long time, and was not assigned to any particular team. All the supervisors assumed he was hard at work under someone else's supervision.

Whenever he was asked to do something, he would shake his head sorrowfully, and maintain that he was 'snowed under' with work, and couldn't possibly get around to it for months. He cultivated a slightly ruffled, harassed, look.

In the helpdesk, which I supervised at the time, we were certainly aware that he was one of the more prolific users of the Email system but I only became conscious of the content of his many emails when I received a panicky phone-call one afternoon.

"Quick, Phil, can you cancel an email that I've sent, delete it quick!". He couldn't altogether disguise the panic in his voice.

"I'll see what I can do, Pedro. I'll phone you back".

I ran a check. No, it was in the in-box and couldn't be deleted remotely. It had been sent to a very senior manager in our Italian Manufacturing plant; A middle-aged lady with a moustache and a reputation as a martinet.

I opened up an archived copy of the email and let go an involuntary whistle. Pedro was, in this email, running over the detailed choreography of their next meeting. I had no idea that Pedro could be so articulate. It would have been extremely impressive were it not for the subject matter, which ranged, in graphic detail, over his plans for a torrid and energetic evening of slightly unusual but creative sexual activity. It was a wide-ranging management overview.

"Sorry, Pedro, it is too late. She's probably read it by now."

"No worries", he replied, in a pathetic attempt to sound unflustered.

"I didn't even know you were, ...er... intimate with the lady."

"AAArgh!!! You've read it?"

"Not intentionally, but it was hard to avoid."

"I'm dead meat. It was meant to go to Fabia Woods in accounts, not Fabia Giordano, the Director."

It was easy to do. You just tap in the name Fabia, without realising that there may be two in your address list with vastly different taste in email contents. "Heavens above," I interrupted, reading on, "Is it actually possible to do all this without ending up in the doctor's surgery?"

Over the phone, there was the sound of recently learned exercises in Anger-Management being rehearsed.

"Hmm. I think you ought to just send Fabia Giordano an apology, and make a clean breast of it. Well, perhaps not in those words, considering what you were proposing."

If I have a flaw in my character it is that I find humour irresistible.

"No. She might miss reading one email if I'm in luck, but not two. Once she sees the email that I wrote to Fabia Woods, I might as well go back to my Whelk stall."

I shrugged and wished him luck, pausing merely to print out the email and pin it up on the private helpdesk notice-board in the server room.

Strange, I thought. What is Pedro up to? Has a hard-working Systems Analyst suddenly flipped and engendered a mad passion for a secretary in accounts? A quick glance through the Email archive told a rather different story. The taciturn Pedro was engaged in maintaining a vast portfolio of liaisons with young ladies all over the multi-national organisation. The scope of his activities was breathtaking. He had brought the power of Information Technology to bear on a hitherto time-consuming and inefficient task of the seduction process. How he managed ever to squeeze in any work on behalf of the company that paid his salary I shall never know.

As luck would have it, that evening there was a major lock-up of the mail system. It was, I remember, caused by someone who was leaving the company, and who decided to send a facetious email, with a vast graphic, to all the groups in his address list. I heard later that he had made the mistake of leaving to join a supplier of components to the company. He arrived, smirking, on his first day of his new job to find that the job no longer existed. A phone-call from our senior management to the supplier had given them no choice in the matter.

Whilst clearing out the servers in the dead of night, I happened to be talking over the phone to many other SysOps. One of them was my good friend Guglielmo Annunziata, from the Italian plant. He was in our original team. I couldn't resist telling him about Pedro and his Emails.

"Fabia Giordano is a humourless android."

"So should I tell Pedro to grow a beard and leave for New Zealand under a false name?"

"Pedro is a snake. He took a ton and pony (Ed: £125) off me at cards by sleight of hand, so I'm having a struggle with my natural instincts to rescue a fellow human being. How many times have I had to stay behind in the evenings to finish work he was supposed to have done? However, I know that Fabia Giordano is a complete luddite (Ed: Technology-hater) who has her secretary print out all her emails so she can read them. Also, her English is very poor."

"I suggest a compromise. Are you friendly with her secretary?"

"I should say so. She owes me several favours too."

"Excellent. We might even get your money back."

We plotted far into the night whilst healing the email system, as the hourglass tumbled in our GUIs

The next day Pedro was on the phone. "Result! I'm saved! I was right not to take your advice Mr smarty-pants. 'Clean Breast' I ask you. Six years in college and that's the best you can do? I just need your help a bit. I had an email back this morning from her secretary. Evidently, they can't read English at all and assumed that it was a proposal they were expecting from me on their new CAE systems. They asked for a translation. Can you write up a proposal for some CAE workstations please?"

"Pedro, my advice stands."

He made a dismissive noise. I shrugged.

"Of course, Pedro. Just copy the one we did for Poland."

I heard nothing more for a week. I happened to be in the main IT office area talking to a manager when there was a screech of panic from Pedro's PigPen (Ed: Cubicle). A moment later a white face bobbed over the top of the screen.

"Phil, quick!" he yelled.

He stood at the other end of the pigpen, as far as he could get from the computer screen, as if recoiling from a snake. Mutely, he pointed to the screen. There was an email message. It was from Fabia Giordano's secretary, saying how impressed they were with the CAE plans. They were proposing to circulate the translation with the original English proposal to all the two-hundred engineers affected by the project both in Italy and Britain.

Pedro slumped into his chair, envisaging the scenes of merriment amongst the two hundred engineers as they savoured the description of the athletic acts of congress described in the email

"Pedro, old friend", I added after a pause, "There is just a chance we might be able to rescue you".

"How?" he squeaked

"Well, there is a guy in our Italian helpdesk who might be able to slip into her office, and delete the original email, using the admin login. It would be risky to do but he might be persuaded if we bought him a few drinks. (Ed: Offered him a bribe)"

"H ….how much?" It was sad to see so much misery.

"A monkey might do it (Ed: five hundred pounds)"

There is little more to tell. Fabia Giordano never found out that a dismissable offence had been committed by her secretary in order to protect her from the full force of Pedro's email, or that an email had been sent to Pedro in her name. Pedro was so happy once I was able to tell him that the email was no more that he stood a surprise round of Mauldon's Blackadder (Ed: an English Beer) to the whole of IT.

Guglielmo and I took the entire Italian Helpdesk, and Fabia's secretary out for a meal next time I visited the Italian Manufacturing plant. We all drank Pedro's health. There were smiles all round.

For Pedro, the incident had been like an electric-shock aversion therapy. The emails ceased. Suddenly, his desk became tidier and he actually started polling the Supervisors for work and offering to help out. The flood of emails rapidly reduced to a trickle and, whenever a bored helpdesk analyst, in the dead of night, scanned through Pedro's email archive he found, to his disappointment, only tedious management strategy papers, and earnest IT project proposals. Most curiously, Pedro started to look a lot happier, and the wild cackle of laughter from his Pigpen suddenly became a familiar sound in the department: and we started to like him too.