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The original was posted on /r/tifu by /u/thinkaboutitttttttt on 2026-07-17 21:09:08+00:00.

was venting to who I thought was just my work best friend about our boss micromanaging a project, typed out a pretty detailed message about how he'd rewritten my email three times over word choice and how I was losing my mind about it. hit what I thought was reply, actually hit reply all on a company wide thread that had gone out that morning about the same project.

didn't notice for about four minutes. four minutes of just going about my day, until my friend texted me a single question mark and I opened my email to see my rant sitting there under a subject line that had my boss's name directly in the CC line, meaning he almost certainly had a notification for it before I even registered what I'd done.

I tried to unsend it. our email system does have an unsend feature. it works within a ten second window.

sat there for a solid two minutes just staring at my screen doing the math on how bad this actually was, then walked to my boss's office because I decided delaying it would somehow make it worse, which in hindsight might not even be true but felt true in the moment. he'd already read it. he just looked at me and said "word choice, huh" completely deadpan and I honestly could not tell if I was about to get fired or if he thought it was funny.

turns out it was mostly the second one, though he did also mention, very evenly, that maybe I could bring feedback like that to him directly next time instead of company wide. which, yeah. obviously. I apologized probably four separate times in that conversation alone. still get a little nauseous every time I see the reply all button now.

TL;DR: Meant to complain about my boss to one coworker, complained to the entire company instead. Somehow kept my job, but I still cringe every time I open Outlook.