What would you do ? (Inter-Office Conflict)

Pursuant to Prof. Bell's request to make this blog a bit more interactive, Im inspired to share my official FIRST blog ever with our class.

Below, is a work email exchange I had with a co-worker several months before. Im interested to hear what you would do (if anything) after reading the exchange.

To give you some context; I work at a company that has 500 employees, offices located around the United States, and I manage our databases and applications.

I had just had a hellish 13-hour day working with vendors and network people trying to fix a network problem. The last piece of the solution was for my team to take down our main Finance application (CMS) from the network, after work hours.

I wanted to be pro-active and give everybody in the company a heads-up warning, just in case some people were working late. I sent out a quick informative email, to the entire company. I only received one email back, which is below.


From: Smith, Joe
Sent: Monday, August 11, 2008 4:51 PM
To: Laur, Kim
Subject: RE: CMS will not be available from 19:30 - 20:30 PST tonight


Kim, We are not on Standard time right now so "PST" doesn't make sense. Joe _____________________________________________
From: Laur, Kim
Sent: Monday, August 11, 2008 4:49 PM
To: #Cornerstone Research
Subject: CMS will not be available from 19:30 - 20:30 PST tonight


We are performing server maintenance and anticipate CMS being down from 19:30-20:30 tonight.


Thank you,

Kim

So, put yourself in my shoes. To give you a context of my emotional being at this point: 13 hour day, eyes blood-shot from looking at the computer screen too much, hungry, and very irritated......

Understanding that Im a manager (and he is too) and that I should probably not engage this individual in email banter, what would you do ?

Some background to 'Joe' is that he is known at the company for trying to get under people's skin with annoying comments. Below are some suggestions, but please consider this a free forum and would love to hear your HONEST feedback....not what one should do, but rather of what you would have done, if in the state I was in.

- Write back with a snappy-type attitude:
Joe, Hopefully you were able to make sense and piece together my email warning with the wrong designation of "PST", as the rest of the company seemed to understand.

-Write back a professional-type attitude and thanking him for clarifying that I should have used 'PDT', and hope that he was not confused when CMS would not be available?


-Ignore his email?



Thanks