A college student has shared the funny yet frustrating moment a dreaded reply-all email chain spiraled out of control.
What started as an accidental mass email soon turned into a chain of repetitive “remove me” replies, a scenario all too familiar for many.
The anonymous student, who is attending a U.K. university, took to Reddit‘s r/mildlyinfuriating subreddit to vent about the experience.
“My university email account keeps getting emails where someone has accidently emailed the whole institution, followed by a chain of people replying all “can you remove me” and “can you stop replying” and “if everyone stopped replying this would stop,” they wrote.
Among the endless stream of emails, one reply stood out—and it wasn’t just a standard plea to stop. Someone injected some much-needed humor into the situation by sending a reply that featured ASCII art of a cat. The message read: “It’s funny seeing people respond with ‘stop responding’, which of course, adds another email to the chain. Enjoy this ASCII art of a cat. He’s grumpier on mondays.”
A picture of the ASCII art cat that featured in one reply to the reply-all email which garnered many complaints about all the replies
benithaglas1
The unexpected twist quickly became the highlight of the chaotic thread. While the rest of the emails repeated the same frustrated requests, the student said, this response—complete with the ASCII grumpy Monday cat—managed to lighten the mood.
ASCII art is a way of creating pictures or designs using characters from the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) character set, which includes letters, numbers, punctuation marks and other symbols. Perhaps the most common example is the simple smiley face :-), but more complex versions like the grumpy cat are equally possible.
“The endless chain was infuriating, but that cat—honestly, it was the only reply that made me laugh,” the student told Newsweek.
On Reddit, people reacted to the email chain sharing that seeing requests to be removed in reply-all emails was all too common, with many recounting their own stories of long email chains.
“Glad to see some things never change,” said one Redditor. Another wrote: “A good old replyallpocalypse. Haven’t seen one of those in a while.”
But not all email chains are bad news, in fact one Redditor shared something super positive that came from one. “I met my wife in a reply-all chain,” they wrote. “This is actually true.”
Though the issue of the dreaded “reply-all” persists, this grumpy cat managed to steal the spotlight. As the student hopes for a policy change to prevent future reply-all disasters, at least this particular email chain gave everyone something to smile about—if only for a moment.
