By Hunter Barrat
Online Career Tips, Special Contributor
Auto-fill can be a great time saver—unless it requires you to find a fast face saver!
I work for a large company that uses Outlook’s Office Communicator, an IM feature that lets you hold online chats with coworkers. It’s a great way to bypass the logjam of the clogged email inbox. One day, I was having a spirited Communicator conversation with a colleague that lasted several minutes. I asked him to contact a client to resolve an issue, and I provided the phone number so he could call the man. For the first time, he expressed confusion, as he had no records of interaction with the client. And it was then that I looked closer at my correspondent’s name, and realized that I had been chatting with the wrong person! He had the same first name and first initial of the last name of another employee, and their last names were very similar, up to the last couple of letters. When I initially typed the contact information in the Communicator field, the auto-fill feature supplied a list of possible names, and my casual glance at the name I clicked didn’t catch that I had the wrong person.
Luckily we were not exchanging proprietary information. And luckily this employee had experienced similar encounters with other staff also tricked by the auto-fill. We had a good laugh about it, and returning to Communicator, I entered the name of the person I wanted to reach. The wrong name again popped up in the list of possible matches, but wiser and humbled by my earlier mistake, I passed it by.
Because auto-fill works in the “To:” field of most email programs, it’s also easy to fall victim to this mistake when sending out emails to a group of colleagues. How many “Rsmith”s work in your company? How about “Rsmitt”s? Especially if you are emailing people you don’t usually contact, don’t let auto-fill be the judge of who receives your communication. Most companies have a staff email and phone list. Be sure to double-check the names and email addresses in the “To:” field of any communication program you use. It’s worth the time you spend, before you click on “Send.”
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