Technology has, speaking metaphorically, made the bag an ineffective and obsolete device in which to capture an escaped cat. A senior manager at Bonneville Power Administration's Portland office learned this lesson this week after an anonymous employee sent an e-mail to her on Monday, with copies to dozens of managers and other employees at BPA. The e-mail, which the sender claimed to be sending on behalf of a group, "The Anonymous of HCM," complained that a particular manager was harassing and abusive toward other employees, and gave some examples.
The e-mail may have struck a nerve, because later that evening BPA went around to the computers of the people who had received it and deleted the e-mail -- not, however, before some of the recipients had passed the e-mail along to the outside world. Tuesday morning the manager to whom the e-mail was addressed sent out an e-mail response, quite professional and well-reasoned, giving other ways in which employees could bring personnel problems such as harassment and abusive conduct to the attention of BPA management, and asking the recipients to delete their copies of the original message.
Therein lies the problem: once the electronic cat is out of the bag, it can never again be corralled, and efforts to recapture the cat and give it the Schrodinger treatment only draw more attention (such as mine) to the escaped cat.