When Spencer, a new friend at work, sent me an instant message right before noon, he asked me if I wanted to grab some lunch to talk about an upcoming event.

When I returned to my desk, I thought about the lunch, and it occurred to me that the occasional pauses, casual conversation, and awkward goodbye made the lunch feel like a date.

My friend Jenny sits next to me, but we sometimes chat via instant message so that our coworkers don’t have to hear our conversation.  I started typing.

So i have to tell you what happened

Remember that guy we ran into on this floor last week?

Well he sent me a message a few minutes before lunch,

asking me if i wanted to grab lunch with him to talk

about that event we are participating in

So we met downstairs and the two of us chatted,

but it wasn't really anything important or anything

It was weird though, it kinda had a "date" feel to it

But at work

Even though I knew that Jenny doesn’t always get to her instant messages right away, it had been a while since I sent her the first one, so I looked at her and said, “Why aren’t you responding?”

She looked at her screen then back at me and said, “What are you talking about?”

My eyes flew to the instant message window, and I stood up in shock.  At the top of the window, I read Spencer’s name.

I didn’t know what to do.  I quickly sent him another instant message, apologizing and telling him that I did not mean to send him those messages.  When I didn’t hear from him right away, I assumed that he wasn’t at his desk.

Twenty minutes later, Spencer finally messaged me back.  He told me not to worry about it and tried to make me feel better about my embarrassment.  We laughed about the situation, and I acted like it wasn’t a big deal.

Two months later, I’m glad that I can actually laugh about it.  From talking to coworkers since then, I found out that sending a message to the wrong person is pretty common and has to happen to everyone at least once.

I also learned to always double-check before hitting the send button on an instant message.