The internet makes it all too easy to act in haste, whether it’s a careless “Reply all” or a click of a button that wasn’t quite ready to be clicked. (Perhaps it’s even a premature blog post… if you’ve ever gotten an email alert from us, then clicked to find there was nothing there, odds are, that’s exactly what happened!) We’re sharing our most embarrassing online moments—and we want to hear yours, too!

Ellen Byron

I did indeed accidentally hit “reply all” once. Luckily, it only went to one wrong person—but it was the person I was talking about in the email! Thank God it wasn’t negative, but it definitely revealed something he wasn’t meant to know. I somehow tap danced my way around it with the energy of Gene Kelly, but let me tell you, realizing you accidentally hit “reply all” is HORRIFYING. Like, iffy-call-from-the-doctor bad. But it did give me an idea for a movie called “Reply All,” about someone who accidentally hits that function and how it upends his or her life.  I look forward to writing it someday. And accidentally sending it to the wrong person.

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  Marla Cooper

Okay, while I’ve had front-row seating for several reply-all travesties, I’ve never done it myself (at least not where it’s led to any problems). But, here was my brilliant moment. One night, I was wondering about a former co-worker. We’ll call him Brad Brewer (not his real name). While Brad was quite sure he was the most attractive man on earth, my curiosity was purely random, like, “Wonder what old Brad is up to now?” So. One night, I searched for him on Facebook. I typed his name in and hit return. Unfortunately, I typed it into the wrong place. And for a long moment—until I pieced together what I had done—my Facebook status said: Brad Brewer. Luckily, I realized my mistake quickly, but my face turned bright red and I couldn’t take it down fast enough. Thank God Brad Brewer didn’t go on to Facebook and see what he surely would have interpreted as a lovelorn whispering of his name. DELETE!!!

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Kellye Garrett

So I haven’t had a super embarrassing online moment. Or maybe I have and I just blocked it out. Ironically, I am super into other people’s super embarrassing online moments. I even gave one to the main character in Pay Day. There’s a site called Lamebook that I visit religiously. It chronicles some of the most ridiculous (and, yes, lame) Facebook posts. They definitely are embarrassing…although not always to the person who posted them.  You get things like people being really excited to share their new credit card info or someone who wanted to have a proper cremation for their deceased pet. Not to mention a whole lot of people who made really bad tattoo choices.

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Lisa Q. Mathews

Like Kellye, I can’t quite recall any truly awesome online humiliations. Yeah, I’m probably just in denial. I also happen to be a champion procrastinator, so I always have plenty of time to obsess over my words before Google records them FOREVER AND EVER. However, I can tell you that I once submitted a resume listing a former job title as Executive Idiot rather than Executive Editor. (Gentle readers, I got the job.)

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And finally, now that we’ve been doing this blog for a year, we wanted to share this with you. This is our boilerplate placeholder copy for our group-post template. We figured it was just a matter of time until someone accidentally published a post before it was done, and this is what you would have seen if it had happened. We’re proud to have gotten through our first year without deploying our failsafe!

THIS IS PLACEHOLDER TEXT. If you’re seeing this in the published blog post, that means someone hit publish before she was supposed to! Of course, none of us would ever do such a thing, so this message will probably never be seen by anyone. Then again, that big blue PUBLISH button is so much more inviting than the demure gray SAVE DRAFT button, so who knows. If you do happen to see it, feel free to have a good laugh at our expense in the comments. Because it should probably be a little longer, we’re adding an extra sentence to take up space. We hope you enjoyed this extra bit of communication.

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Readers, have you ever let technology get the best of you? We want to hear you stories in the comments below…

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