The importance of remembering how to spell your name

There was a discussion on Slashdot about corporate ethics and system administrators reading other people's emails. That reminded me of the following story:

A friend of a friend was working in IT as a Windows administrator. He was called to fix some boss' computer, who then went out to lunch leaving the friend alone with the computer. The friend happened to see a mail on the boss' computer that he found interesting, so he forwarded it to himself.

This is surely a bad thing to do, and the end of the story is that he got fired, but he probably would have got away with it apart from the mistake he made...

He managed to spell his own name wrong in his email address. So when the the boss got back from lunch, there was the bounce mail waiting for him in his inbox, with the friend's misspelt name...

P.S. I recently created a nerdy privacy-respecting tool called When Will I Run Out Of Money? It's available for free if you want to check it out.

This article is © Adrian Smith.
It was originally published on 11 Feb 2008
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