Whoops.
I sent an email to a colleague yesterday including some very private and confidential comments made to me by a senior European Commission official about his personal differences with official EU policy on a certain very sensitive issue.
My colleague then replied to me with some more information about something else, which I thought was sufficiently interesting that I forwarded his email on to a couple of other Commission officials – and the Finnish presidency of the EU – completely failing to notice that my original email was still part of the chain.
Needless to say, the first Commission official was on the phone to me first thing this morning. I grovelled as grovellingly as I can ever remember having grovelled before, and have sent him an email promising to do anything I can in recompense.
A lesson there for everyone about forwarding emails. I confessed all to the boss, who says he has done much worse himself (which I can believe) and that I shouldn’t worry about it on his account (which is nice of him).
Whoops.
I don’t know what you’d call it (although I like‘s suggestions) but I suppose the problem is it’s not the sort of thing you’d notice is wrong unless you knew it was wrong and unless you did, you wouldn’t think to get it checked in the editorial process.