Aviva sacks 1300 staff by mistake

Once upon a time there were Stenographers – highly intelligent blokes who would take down dictations and type letters correctly.  Though they were capable of handling communication on their own, they would generally would do only as instructed.  In olden days, even a ‘rejection’ or ‘regret letter’ used to be drafted individually, personally addressed and sent.  At a personal level, people used to write a lot and send letters to near and dear.  Post  Offices were busy selling - Cards, Inland letters and postal covers.

World has changed – even e-mail is now considered obsolete. And in official communication, people try to use templates, auto-fill and look to other tools. Technology helps, assists those who use it, enslaves others who are dependent on it.

One of the fine tools is ‘Mail merge’ – a software function describing the production of multiple (and potentially large numbers of) documents from a single template form and a structured data source.  Mail Merge was originally the name of a utility supplied with MultiMate an early word processing product for the IBM PC, patterned after Wang word processors. This technique of merging data to create gave rise to the term mail merge.  Used generically, the term mail merge is a process to create personalized letters and pre-addressed envelopes or mailing labels for mass mailings from a word processing document which contains fixed text, which will be the same in each output document, and variables, which act as placeholders that are replaced by text from the data source.  The data source is typically a spreadsheet or a database which has a field or column for each variable in the template. When the mail merge is run, the word processing system creates an output document for each row in the database, using the fixed text exactly as it appears in the template, but substituting the data variables in the template with the values from the matching columns.

A common usage is for creating "personalised" letters, where a template is created, with a field for "first name", for example. The templated letter says "Dear ", and when executed, the mail merge creates a letter for each record in the database, so it appears the letter is more personal. Another common usage is for creating address labels from a Customer Relationship Management database, or for mass emails with pertinent information in them.

Daily Mail UK reports that blundering Aviva accidentally 'sacked' 1,300 staff after forwarding goodbye email to everyone.  It is reported that the Human Resources department at Aviva Investors in Britain accidentally sent out a goodbye email to 1,300 staff stating  'goodbye'  to everyone individually. The email was a standard message sent to people leaving the company, covering things such as handing back company equipment and confidentiality rules.   The message sent out was supposed to go to one worker who was leaving that day.  Instead it told all the staff: 'I would like to take this opportunity to thank you and wish you all the best for the future.'  Within minutes bosses realised what had happened and 25 minutes later the email was recalled.  A second email was sent to all staff apologising for the mistake.  Aviva Investors are the investment arm of Aviva insurers and have an office in London.  A spokesman said the message did not tell people that they were fired.

With regards – S. Sampathkumar.