its less confidential if you fax it to the wrong place

i adore my officemates, just not all my coworkers. my company works in about 15 states, therefore i don't work with all my coworkers on a regular basis. and on occasion, my office likes to poke fun at the other offices...so yesterday was a really funny day.

everyone in other parts of the company fax their work to my office. we were getting so many faxes that our several fax machines and phone lines could not keep up. about two years ago we switched to a fax server. we can now receive over twenty faxes at the same time, and on occation actually do. everyone faxes to an 888 number, their fax travels the world, it is changed to a pdf file, and arrives in our office as an email attachment. everyone in my office has access to a generic email account which receives all the faxes. every so often i log into the account, pick out the faxes that are for me, and leave the rest for my officemates. many times a day we receive someone else's fax. someone in another office meant to fax to a local business or to a different office but wasn't paying attention and put in our #.

at some point earlier in the week, someone in a different office was written up for doing a particularly poor job. the write up detailed the specific things the employee was terrible at and encouraged them to do better. it was signed at the bottom, labelled confidential at the top, and the accidentally faxed to us. and while i feel really bad for the employee, we all had a great big laugh about this since we all got the email and all opened the attached fax and all read the "confidential memo."