Blind copying is a nefarious and evil practice.
I’m sure there are legitimate reasons for including this sordid little feature in most email packages. It’s fine if you want to send an email newsletter, a gag or whatever to a whole slew of friends and care to respect their privacy by not shoving all the email addresses into the To: line. But in my experience the way the “BCC:” line is most commonly used in corporate life is unpleasant, dishonest and just plain snarky.
It’s the ultimate passive-aggressive CYA tactic.
Passive-aggressive because in most cases it comes from people who don’t have the integrity or mettle to just pick up the phone or walk down the hall to pick their fights. You’ve got a problem with me? Come tell me about it. What kind of insidious audit trail crap are you trying to pull by firing your snot at me under cover of an email in the first place?
As if this wasn’t bad enough, you then double-cover your devious ass by making sure your boss, my boss, and half the world gets to watch as you hang me out to dry. This kind of sanctimonious, conniving filth distorts the wholly marvellous and wonderful collaborative medium of email into something acrid and rancorous.
One of the places I worked at in the last few years seemed to breed champion BCC-ers. Everyone was doing it – it was a venomous, barely hidden undernet spreading throughout the corporation like some vile, choking fungus.
BCC begets more BCC. You cover my ass and I’ll cover yours, and together we’ll all point the finger at everyone else and no one will ever have to take ownership of anything. The damn thing’s so insidious, I freely admit I even fell into the trap on occassion myself. I hate this. I hate the fact that I’ve lowered myself to this level. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Pass me the birch rods, matron.
Of the average 250+ emails I’d get on a daily basis, sometimes as many as a third were blind-copied to me. The subtext was always an “FYI”, a “friendly word in your ear”, “just thought you should know”.
Ack! Phhhhtttffft! “Just thought you should know” be hanged – you’re snotting on your colleagues. You’re staging a pissing match without even the courage to come out from the cubicles – directing your malicious stream over the three-quarter walls with lethal accuracy, so your opponent can never know who or what has hit them until too late.
I caught one of the snivelling, bush-league weasels at it once. I’d just got this offensive, wretched little message, addressed only to me (or so it appeared) and marked “confidential”, from a bloke in one of the project teams I was part of – beating me up for my alleged failure to deliver on a deadline. (OK, the truth: I had, in fact, dropped the ball. It happens).
The phone rang. It was a fellow VP in one of our other offices, calling in all innocence to say: “Boy! He really fried you on that one, didn’t he?”
“Huh?”
Of course, he’d missed the fact that his copy of the flame in question was sent to him blind. I had no idea he’d seen it. This also meant that I had no idea who else had seen it. So I checked. One phone call to my boss – he’d seen it too. And his boss, the Chairman of the Mothership.
Banzai! Fava beans in one hand, Chianti in the other – I hit the cube farm in search of a bloody reckoning.
This actually happened (well – all except the Fava beans thing). Today, the same grotty little yob showed up in my email again – two years down the track. He’s been downsized from the old place and wants my assistance, networking, resume counseling, whatever.
So what would you do...?
