Inappropriate Emails

Most of us have done it.

We use our office e-mail to send something personal and most employers don’t have a problem with it.

But be careful what you send because it could land you in trouble with your boss.

In the world of email it’s probably the most common if not unwelcome kind:
The forwarded joke.

Someone’s attempt to either brighten your day or clutter your inbox or perhaps offend you?

We showed an email to various people that was forwarded to our news desk by a viewer. It tells a joke about a girl who discovers two spiders mating.

“What do you call the spider on top? she asked. that’s a daddy longlegs, her mother answered.“

The girl reacts by stomping the spiders. 

“well, that may be okay in California, but we’re not having any of that gay (expletive) in Tennessee, she said.“

To be fair not everyone was offended by it

But then we showed people who originally sent the email before the viewer sent it to us, many thought it was inappropriate.
The sender was a police officer for the veterans affairs hospital in Asheville.

We forwarded the email to the officer’s supervisor at the hospital he said he was quote -“shocked” and that he would look into it.

Later public affairs officer Jerry Thomas sent the following statement:

“The Department of Veterans Affairs prohibits sending or forwarding email messages that are inappropriate, illegal or offensive. Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention we completed an internal review and will be handling this as a personnel matter.“

Thomas would not say if or how the officer is being disciplined but we know inappropriate emails have cost government employees their jobs in the past.

Two city of Seneca employees were suspended last December after sending out a racially-charged Christmas poem.
One of them resigned.
That brings up the “tax dollars at work” issue
The people we spoke with in Asheville seemed just as concerned about the fact that the email was sent from a government computer.

ezinearticles.com states the obvious - If you are using email at work use it only for work-related email. That is what personal email accounts are for.
There are plenty of free email services such as gmail, yahoo and hotmail that are web-based and you can access from any computer with an internet connection.

Learn more about work email etiquette:

Forwards
Grammar
Humor
Fonts
Greeting & Salutations