Do you know how to recall an email that you may have mistakenly sent? Do you know how to do so quickly in the event that you really messed up and didn't want said email to go out?

Guess what I learned yesterday...

I received an email that needed attention so I forwarded it to a colleague whom I thought would handle it. He replied to me letting me know that he wasn't the contact person for this request and he told me to whom I should forward it. Fine.

All was well and I forwarded it to the suggested person quickly as I was super busy and had about 1,000 things to do. Later on in the day when I had a few minutes, I scrolled back through my emails to make sure that I hadn't missed any. This is the good part...

I looked at the email again from that morning from my colleague and there was a line at the bottom of it that said "between you and me, I doubt if anything will be done because B---- messed up in the first place and never fixes anything".

It's at this point that you can imagine to whom I forwarded this email. Yep, to B----.

Thus begins a frantic search for "How to Recall an Email" from the help section of MS Outlook. Do you know how hard it is to find what you need in a full-on panic mode?

Five very long minutes later, I recalled the email. Thank goodness! I sat back in my chair with a big sigh of relief, happy to have avoided conflict.

That feeling was short-lived. A few minutes later, I received an email from the system that the recall "failed" as "recipient has already received" this email and opened it.

This is a situation where I felt it legitimate to let a few expletives fly...

That was the end of my day yesterday and I'm just going to work now. This is going to be a fun day.

Here is a link for how to recall an email in case this happens to you: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA010917601033.aspx

Have a great day at work, everybody!