"Hey, Sadiq? This is Toby Flenderson."

"Hi Toby, what can I do for you?"

"I'm having some trouble with my email. I saved a draft last night, but I can't get back into it. I've gotta get it to corporate by five o'clock today."

"Yeah, the email server's been having sporadic problems, although it's not affecting everyone. I've been working on it all day, still trying to nail down the issue."

"These are annual reviews and today is the deadline. The email is ready to go, I just need to open it up and hit send."

"I might be able to come up with a workaround. Let me do a little research and call you back?"

"Sure."

Half an hour later, his phone rang. "Dunder Mifflin, this is Toby."

"Hey Toby, it's Sadiq."

"Thanks for calling me back. Any word on the email situation?"

"Here's the scoop. If I can't get the email server working by the end of the day, I could execute a shell command to send all pending drafts. That's kind of the nuclear option, though, because there's no way to call that function for a single email. At least, not as far as I can tell. I can't even call it for an individual email box. It can only be executed at the server level."

"I'm not really great with computers. What does that mean?"

"It would send everyone's saved drafts automatically."

"Just at the Scranton office? Or the entire company?"

"The email servers are distributed per location, so it would affect Scranton only."

Toby shrugged. Dunder Mifflin was not known for its tech-savvy. He doubted anyone besides him used email drafts at all. "If I can't send this email today, my… you know… is grass. Can you plan to do that around 4:30 if everything isn't up and running by then?"

"Sure, I'll just need secondary approval from someone in corporate."

"I'll have Kendall call you."

"That'll work."

"Thanks, man."

--

Pam was putting the finishing touches on her letter when the mail client crashed. The window with the open draft closed itself. She sighed, re-opening the program from the tray. It happened occasionally, sometimes in the middle of writing an email, which was particularly frustrating. At least she hadn't lost any work this time.

After a couple of tries, the window came back up. She opened her drafts folder, but the messages inside it were gone. 'Huh, that's weird,' she thought. She checked her deleted items. Not there. Everything looked normal in her inbox and archive.

She picked up her phone with another, heavier sigh. This was not the way she'd hoped to spend the end of her day. "Hey Sadiq, it's Pam Beesly."

"Hi Pam, what can I do for you?"

"I had a bunch of saved drafts that went missing. I checked the deleted folder and don't see them there."

"Oh yeah, I just executed a script to send all saved drafts. There were some problems with the server, and Toby had a draft that needed to go to corporate today."

"W-What?" she stammered out, barely able to breathe.

"Yeah, did you check your sent mail?"

She opened the folder. Oh my god oh my god OH MY GOD. Was she dreaming? She must be dreaming, because this kind of shit did not happen in the real world. "Sadiq, I had a bunch of saved drafts go out that weren't supposed to be sent." She began frantically clicking the recall button on each message. "Can we pull those back?"

"You can try to recall them. Depending on the recipient's settings, it may not succeed."

"It was to someone else in the office," she hissed. "Can't you just pull them back, or delete them remotely!?"

"I'd need secondary approval from someone in corporate."

Messages began rolling in, one after the other:

***RECALL ATTEMPT FAILED: ACCESS DENIED DUE TO RECIPIENT SETTINGS***

She was going to die. Or was she already dead and in her own personal hell? Yeah, let's go with that. "I tried, the system won't let me recall them. These were messages of a very… personal nature. Is there anything you can do? I am begging you."

"I'm really sorry, Pam. Company network, company rules. It's not my call. It's the policy. You can try Jan or Kendall in HR. But until I hear from them, there's nothing I can do. I'm really, really sorry."

"Me too," she whispered, hanging up the phone. She glanced forlornly at the clock. 4:40 PM. Jim would probably be back any minute now. She worried the letter she'd written him between her hands, mind stumbling wildly, light-years a minute. She was ready to tell him how she felt, but she didn't want it to come through the unfiltered lens of the emails she'd written over the past few months. He would think she was a goddamn basket case. Even if she clearly was a goddamn basket case. What the hell was she going to do?