Recently an email written by a newly hired Microsoft employee about life as a Google employee made the rounds on popular geek social news and social bookmarking sites such as Slashdot, Reddit, del.icio.us and Digg. The mail was forwarded around and posted to a blog without the permission of its original author. The author of the email (who should not be confused with the idiot who blogs at http://no2google.wordpress.com) has posted a response which puts his email in context in addition to his reaction on seeing his words splattered across the Internet. In his post entitled My Words Geoffrey writes

Today my words got splashed all around the Internet. It’s interesting to see them living a life of their own outside the context they were created in. I enjoyed seeing it on Slashdot, reading the thoughtful responses whether they agreed or disagreed, and laughing out loud at the people who were just there to make noise. It’s fun, in the abstract, to the be the author of the secret thing everyone is gathered around the water cooler talking about.

The responses are my personal impressions, communicated to my Microsoft recruiter in the context of a private 1:1 conversation. A few days after I sent my response to the recruiter, I saw an anonymized version floating around and being discussed inside Microsoft. I hadn’t realized at the time that I wrote it that it would be distributed widely within Microsoft so that was a bit of a shock. To see them distributed all over the Internet was another shock altogether. The biggest shock was when Mary Jo Foley over at ZDNet Blogs sent a message to my personal email account.

Read the rest of his post to see the email he sent to Mary Jo Foley as well as how he feels about having words he thought were being shared in private published to tens of thousands of people without his permission and with no thought to how it would impact him.