Sent By Mistake, A U.S. Embassy Email Invited People To A Cat Pajama Party

In the markedly difficult endeavor of reducing human error, we’re often fraught with staring mistake based problems in the face. They’re often not pretty, even less often amusing. Of course, among the types of human error, there are certain places that attention failures can cause humorous results.

The U.S. Embassy in Australia, fortunately, made a humorous mistake recently. While training new embassy employees on their email newsletter templating platform, an email was accidentally sent out to an undisclosed amount of recipients from the State Department. If you’re expecting the level of panic from Hawaii’s missile alert mistake, we’re sorry to disappoint.

The email mistakenly sent out to an unknown amount of people was an invite to a cat pajama-jam with an attached photo of a cat dressed in a Cookie Monster costume whilst holding a plate of cookies. Complete with an RSVP button, the rogue State Department email got people’s attention and they thought it was pretty funny.

Twitter went wild with it and the cat memes that saturate the internet were flying around. As the email went viral, the Embassy looked into the error.

“Sorry to disappoint those of you who were hoping to attend this ‘cat pajama-jam’ party, but such an event falls well outside our area of expertise,” said Embassy spokesperson Gavin Sundwall.

He also assured that human error reduction training would be bolstered with stronger management protocols, all the while being rather serious and buttoned up about the cat pajama-jam email mishap. In manufacturing, 45% of manufacturers admit there’s room for improvement in accident prevention. While the stakes are a bit different from manufacturing to email templating, the cat pajama-jam email represents a level of human error that needs be taken very seriously.

Reducing human error in technological fields remains one of the most important realms in which costly mistakes can be made at the touch of key or click of a mouse. Fortunately, this time it had no extreme consequences and ended up being funny. This isn’t usually the case and careless errors stand to wreak much more havoc than inviting people to a cat pajama-jam.

Still, that’s a party we’d definitely RSVP YES! to.