The email I won't end up sending

Dear Colleagues,

I wanted to send you a quick note to thank you for the lovely Christmas surprise that you left me.

Firstly, thank you for making completely new versions of the two programmes I subtitled before Christmas, without telling me. As you know, it's my job to put the subtitles on these programmes, which takes quite a long time, so it's always lovely to get a chance to throw away that work and repeat it for a second time.

Thank you also for making the new programme almost identical to the old one, except with numerous random timing and content changes throughout, thereby making it almost completely impossible to use any of the material I created for the old version. It's lovely to get a chance to repeat a complete day's work over again.

Thank you especially for making this such a nice surprise, by going, I am sure, to such special effort not to tell me that this was happening. Thank you also for only scheduling the new version where you knew I wouldn't see it, leaving the old version in the place where it should be, thereby ensuring that this wonderful surprise was not spoiled.

Thank you to the gods for arranging that I would only discover this late on the night before the programmes are broadcast, and coincidentally when our corporate network connection would be running at such a glacial pace that it would take me nearly four hours to retrieve these new versions of the programme onto my computer before I could even start working on them. Again.

Thank you too for timing this so that it would occur on a weekend, on my holiday, making sure that I get the maximum possible value from my time off by not having any opportunity to sleep on Saturday night so that I may instead enjoy those otherwise wasted hours by being awake. And working.

Coridally yours,

Humphrey Q Horsequarters

(OK, that last bit was a bit dramatic, but otherwise it's a terribly positive and and friendly email, wouldn't you say? Or is this what they call passive-agressive?)

Still, it's not so bad. It didn't take that long to fix it all in the end... :)