Another Reason It's Not a Great Idea to Mix Your Personal and Professional Lives

At work when I send out large group e-mails, with the help of our IT guys as the middlemen, I use a company called Constant Contact that sets up professional looking "email campaigns" and keeps up with who's read the email, who didn't get it, who says they didn't get it but really did, etc. So, when people get group e-mails from me when I'm announcing our program calendar or an upcoming lecture or other event, their e-mail message appears in the same format as our company's homepage. It's pretty snazzy.

If email recipients only have "text-only" capability, they won't see the web-page images, but they can still read the text of my message.

So, I recently sent out an "email campaign" and have gotten a few replies that have been truly baffling. A couple have been RSVP responses to an invitation that went out in April, for an event held in April, where people actually replied, "I'm sorry, I won't be able to make it." That little snafu was our IT guys' fault--they didn't clear out the last campaign or something of that nature. They assured me that ONLY people that opened the email with "text-only" capability saw the former invitation and out of 350 + people it was sent to, it's probably not that many.

So, yesterday I get a reply from someone (who's replying to the correct, recent email) and it's all good, but in her reply to me, I notice she has picture attachments, 2 gifs and 1 jpeg. I was curious why she'd attach a picture file to an email reply to me, so I opened the attachments.

One of the attachments was of several images and I only discovered this by scrolling my mouse roller up and down. One was our website heading, one was a spacer, but then--sit down for this--one was of JOHNNY! As a BABY!
It totally freaked me out so I immediately forwarded that message to our IT guys and got the director on the phone and said, "Open the attachments! Are you looking at a PICTURE OF MY SON??" He insisted that no, he saw the webpage header and the spacer and all business-related images, but none of a fresh-faced baby. Without a satisfactory answer from our IT guy as to why this happened, I hung up and immediately deleted all personal photo files I could find on my computer at work. Because, God forbid, what if people accidentally pulled this up?
Or this one?
Or even this?
Or what about this?Well, that would actually be funny.