so nobody's perfect

It has been suggested that I have been a tad harsh on the hapless dean of my law school (the website of which, by the way, was down today, although the main site of the university was not). I acknowledge that. It is time for me to admit that I once accidentally posted a death threat on a statewide mailing list of lawyers.

Okay, it wasn't a real death threat. The episode, shall we say, involved someone who went away on vacation and left his autoresponder to reply to his emails. There was some reason that I no longer recall why the list owner wasn't able to set the fellow on no-mail until his staff could be reached or he came back from vacation. After several days of autoreplies, I wrote an email with the subject "[So-and-So] Must Die," which of course is a reference to the Traffic classic "John Barleycorn Must Die."

Here's the stupid part. I sent my email to the mailing list that the poor blighter was autoresponding to. The message was actually meant for another destination entirely. I did, however, receive several private messages of appreciation of my sentiments.

That was probably about three years ago. And I haven't done anything like that since. Why keep making the same mistakes when there are always new ones to make?