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Costly Mistake
I was advising a client last year on transferring his property business into a partnership and had discussions with the bank to novate the mortages over to the partnership name along with the properties and they confirmed in writing that this could be done without additional fees.
Subsequently the bank advised (by e-mail) that they had reviewed the old loan agreements and the terms did not allow the loan to be novated. The only alternative would be to redeem the old loans and issue new agreements (at a cost of some £9,000).
Unfortunately the e-mail included forwarded conversations with other members of the bank and included an admission that the loans could not be novated as the bank had lost the original paperwork.
The bank concerned is now the subject of litigation!
Put a delay into an Outlook rule
One way of giving yourself a second chance to catch bungles like these is to set up a simple rule in Outlook (or Outlook Express) – via the Tools/Rules&Alerts menu – to delay sending messages for 1 (or more) minute(s). This gives you an opportunity to fish the offending item back out of the Outbox folder before it gets moved to the Sent Items folder.
I find a one minute delay acceptable for this purpose, but anything longer and it would probably start to be inefficient.
Hope this helps.
John W
The time-delay technique revealed
Good afternoon Sir Les,
As JohnWW points out the automated delay trick can save you from many of these situations (several of which I have experienced). Simon Hurst explained how to do it earlier this year in his Top efficiency tips for Microsoft Office (it's tip number 4):
go to the Tools drop-down menu and select Rules and Alerts. From there, create a new rule using the following rule descriptions: ‘Check messages after sending’, leaving the next set of conditions blank (triggering a warning box that can be ignored), selecting "Defer deliver by a number of minutes" from the next list of conditions, and selecting the number of minutes to delay the message. Give the rule a name, press Apply, and it’s in place ready to offer a safety net.
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John Stokdyk, Technology editor
One from a client
One of my clients is in management training at quite a high level - board level at plc - providing one to one training. One delegate provided very poor work for a set session, and my client forwarded this to their senior manager with a brutal analysis of the delegate's abilities and professionalism. Except that she clicked "reply" and not "forward"...
Oops!
Many years ago, I sent a joke about management skills (something to do with monkeys, if I remember rightly) to a few colleagues - unfortunately one of those colleagues had the same first name as the managing partner and the automatic system picked up his email address instead and I didn't notice (but I learnt to check after that!).
I'd only been in the job a few weeks and never met the managing partner (who was based in another office). Fortunately he was a nice man with a good sense of humour. He phoned me up to thank me for the joke, which he thought was very funny!
But it's funnier when it happens to someone else, of course. In a large firm I once worked for, a trainee accountant managed to send an email with a large attachment full of jokes to everyone in the firm instead of just a few friends - and screwed up the email system for a while!