SMS in error

Garry Hertzberg, practising attorney at Dewey Hertzberg levy and Host of the Laws of Life with Garry Hertzberg on Cliffcentral.com, writes:

You have just sent a message to your new boyfriend telling him how sexy he looks in his new jeans.

You realise a moment too late that the naughty message you have just sent is going to the wrong David. It was meant for David, your boyfriend, but it’s going to David, the creepy guy in IT. How do you explain to ‘creepy Dave’ that you really don’t think that he’s the one?

If it has happened to you, you’ll understand the sudden rising panic that moment after pushing the send button. There is a split second when you realise what you’ve done, you look on in disbelief and pray for the earth to open up and swallow you whole. Your stomach knots, you imagine every possible excuse under the sun to explain yourself – but nothing sounds good enough.

This brings to mind a case where a salesperson who wanted to send a message to his wife which read: ‘These idiots at the office are trying to fire me… The HR dork thinks I was born yesterday’. Instead, he sent it to the very HR guy he was insulting. He got a text back: ‘That wasn’t meant for me was it?’ and landed up in a disciplinary enquiry.

They wanted to use the message against him and he argued that it couldn’t be used because he had sent it by mistake.

This is simply not the case. The recipient of a message can use the message as evidence if it serves to prove the offence, even if it was not meant for them. Think about it, any person committing an offence only gets caught because of their mistakes. Can you imagine a shoplifter raising the defence that they were caught on camera but they meant to be out of sight? Or a burglar saying they didn’t intend to leave fingerprints so you can’t use them against him?

Instant communication has become such an ingrained feature of our daily lives that we often send messages without thinking and without being mindful of our actions.

The right way to deal with this is to take half a second and make sure everything is correct before hitting the send button.