SEND US NEWS TIPS!
blog@nypress.com






NEW YORK STORIES

Change Your Password

By Lianne Stokes

When David SHIPLEY and Will Schwalbe wrote Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home, they left out the chapter on how to handle things when you get caught breaking into a co-worker’s email because you’re entangled in an inter-office love-triangle.

It was May 2001 when I took a job as a “creative assistant” at a major ad agency in Midtown—which meant I had plenty of time to develop randy crushes on my co-workers. Specifically, Russell.Carlton@adplace.com swept me off my feet at the Christmas party. He had downed too many Tanqueray and tonics and told me, “I think we’d make a great couple.” To which I replied, “My dad would love you!”

But long after the tree at Rock Center had been taken down, he still hadn’t made good on his words. A year and a half later and I wasn’t over it. According to the grapevine, he was still using our row of cubicles as his personal Match.com, now dating Ashley.Andrews@adplace.com. I’d gone to college with her; I knew her back when she was Ashley.Andrews@syr.edu! And we had a contentious history.

When I asked our mutual friend why she didn’t like me, she said, “Ashley doesn’t like it when I’m friends with other people.” So she was retaliating by forcing me to share a guy I never had? The worst part was that she knew he’d hurt me because I’d talked to her about it. Who did this bottle blond think she was?

One day, Ashley.Andrews@adplace.com called me down to her office. Wearing her signature Limited tunic and cotton/poly-blend black pants, she curtly told me, “Look, I know that you’ve been snooping around trying to find out about me and Russell. We’re dating and I’m not apologizing to you.” I nodded, smiled and said, “No hard feelings.” But truthfully, my feelings were harder than a mattress at the Motel Six. It was war.

That night, I stayed late at work. I snuck into Ashley.Andrews@adplace.com’s office and closed the door. I was known for playing practical jokes using my co-workers’ email addresses. I’d write Rita in accounts payable from the cute guy’s desk, telling her how hot he thought she was. My “victims” were always in on the jokes, so it was all in good fun. But I knew this wouldn’t be construed as such.

I, a corrupt version of Nancy Drew, had a mystery to solve. When I clicked the icon on her desktop labeled “MS Outlook,” it prompted me for a password. Ashley.Andrews@adplace.com’s not too complex, so I tried our company’s name. Her email popped up like a jack-in-the-box, and there was Russell.Carton@adplace.com. It took me five minutes to thumb through the paper trail: he had sent her an email inviting her to happy hour. She replied, “I’d love to, but I’m afraid that Lianne [me] would pour a drink on my head.” To which he said, “If you know Lianne, you know that she’d never be so frivolous with a drink.”

The next day, I made the profound mistake of telling a few coworkers about the light reading I’d done the night before, and it got back to Ashley.Andrews@adplace.com. We communicated with each other through mutual parties, much like Churchill and Hitler did back in the day. At one point, she agreed to meet me outside of the office. Standing on the corner of 47th and Lex, she stomped her red, patent leather boot on the concrete. “You’re lucky I don’t punch you right now!” she snarled.

Later, her people approached my people. Ashley.Andrews@adplace.com had let it marinate and decided to go to the ad authorities and lodge a complaint. Later that day my boss, Stacey, with whom I was close, called me into her office. She told me that Ashley.Andrews@adplace.com’s boss had let her know what I did and that she wanted to drive me
home after work so we could talk about it. That evening, I sat perched in the front seat of her Volkswagen Jetta wanting to die. Stacey looked at me and said, “You know that I love you, but you can’t do things like that.”
“I know,” I whispered.

“We all make mistakes,” she said. Yeah, and breaking into a rival’s computer to read her email will never again be one of mine.

  Do you have a New York story?  

  E-mail  nystories@nypress.com

del.icio.us digg NewsVine