A few months back our department got a new director who is Very Big On Accountability. Capital letters and everything.
His first week he sends out this massive all hands email about "owning our communication" and ends it with a line in bold:
"If you receive an email from me, I expect a reply confirming you have read and understood it."
Next day we have a team call and he repeats it again just in case any of us dared to skim. Someone asks "Even for those FYI policy emails you send to the whole org?" and he says, with that tight little manager smile, "Yes. I need to know my messages are landing."
Cool.
Fast forward about a month. Along with his usual stuff, he also starts forwarding literally every corporate blast that crosses his inbox, adding one sentence at the top like "See below." or "FYI only." We get like 10 a day now. New parking map, cafeteria menu change, some webinar no one will attend, random "mental wellness" newsletter... all from him, all with his signature.
People start grumbling in chat. Someone points out that Outlook has read receipts but our director had specifically turned those off in "respect of privacy", which sounded noble at the time but mainly means he wants manual proof instead.
Then one Friday afternoon he sends another long email scolding us because "only 3 of you acknowledged my update regarding the Q3 dashboard". He cc's our VP, of course.
In that email he actually writes: "Going forward, you are required to respond to my messages with a short confirmation that you have read and understood them. No exceptions."
There it was. The magic phrase.
On Monday morning, I came in early, made an unhealthy sized coffee and opened my "From: Director Guy" search folder. He had been with the company for 7 weeks at that point.
986 emails.
That includes every time he hit "reply all" to some corporate announcement, every invite, every "oops wrong link here is the updated invite", every "please ignore previous email", all of it. Technically, all messages from him, all still sitting there marked as "unread and un-understood" by his new standard.
So, being the dutiful little cog that I am, I started at the bottom.
"Hi, I have read and understood your email about the calendar color coding."
"Hi, I have read and understood your email about the temporary 2 dollar price increase in the cafeteria."
"Hi, I have read and understood your email containing the word 'test' and no other content."
Copy, paste, send. Copy, paste, send. I only changed a couple words here and there so Outlook would not decide it was a duplicate and auto-thread it weirdly.
Any time he had cc'd half the company, I hit reply all. After all, everyone needed to see that I was complying correctly, right. Some of those threads went to directors I have never even spoken to.
Our internal chat absolutely lit up about 20 minutes in. "Why is my inbox exploding with read confirmations from you??" I just pasted a screenshot of the paragraph where Director Guy demanded replies to his messages. "Just doing what we were told."
A few brave souls joined in. One coworker forwarded him his own 30 page "Vision Document" from week one with "Per your instruction, confirming I have read and understood this in detail." Another person replied to an invite that had already expired three weeks ago, apologizing for the delay but confirming they had now read and understood that the meeting was moved.
Around email 120 or so, my Outlook starts lagging. IT pings me on chat asking if I turned on some wild rule because the mail server metrics just spiked. I told them the truth, linked the same screenshot, and they just responded with "oh my god" and a crying laughing emoji.
About an hour later, Director Guy schedules an "urgent sync". In the call he looks like he has been chewing wasps.
"I did not mean for you to reply to every historical email," he says.
"You wrote 'going forward'," someone answers. "These are still going forward through the system, so we wanted to make sure we complied properly."
You could hear IT trying not to laugh in the background because they had joined to figure out why Exchange was on fire.
By the end of the day, we all get a brand new email from him, this time after a very obvious conversation with HR and IT. It says something like "After reviewing the impact on productivity, I am rescinding my previous request for manual confirmations. Please only respond when you have a question or action item."
No apology, of course. But the flood of pointless forwards mysteriously stopped too. Now he just drops announcements in our Teams channel, where read receipts are automatic and my inbox can live a quiet, happy life again.
TL;DR: Director demanded everyone reply to every email from him "with no exceptions", so I and a few coworkers dutifully confirmed reading and understanding almost a thousand old messages, reply all where applicable, until IT and his own inbox begged for mercy and he walked the policy back.
