Alan Horkan wrote:
(crud below)
Sorry for the offtopic but you sure aren't joking! Does your boss have pointy hair?
I'm amazed your employers are not embarassed by this sort of thing. Do they include it on every fax and on the company letterhead? Do they make you read it out everytime you answer the phone?
When will the madness ever end?
It is funny in a tragi-comic kind of way.
It may be different in Ireland, but at least in the US the trend is to cover your ass even if it doesn't make any sense. For instance, when posting to a public mailing list. Or, the fact that the writer and the addressee both have rights to the content in correspondence no mater if it was the correct address or not.
I'm not entirely sure of the whole history, but I think it started with fax cover sheets from doctor's offices. They included a little message on the top basically saying "If this isn't for you, please don't read it, it is someone's confidential information." This was to try and help in the situation of the shared office fax, so that other people in the office wouldn't find out about your medical issues. Then the lawyers came up with rather mean sounding statements, claiming you _could_ be violating some law (which I've never seen) by them misaddressing the content. Now it's moved on to e-mail. Not more legally defensible, just hating people with limited mailbox sizes or limited bandwidth connections.
I wish it would stop, but that seems unlikely. Corporate culture in the US at least is in risk avoidance mode.
--Ted
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