Gold-Digging E-Mail Brings Red Faces At JPMorgan Chase

E-mail etiquette: The “spectacularly beautiful” 25-year-old woman’s effort to snag a rich husband was not exactly the kind of deal that usually involves JPMorgan Chase. But that’s the position in which the New York firm found itself when an employee signed his name to an e-mail chain that was soon forwarded around the Internet, posted to blogs and eventually made it into the most e-mailed stories lists of The New York Times.

JPMorgan has said the employee accidentally signed the forwarded e-mail but was not its author. No matter. The damage was done: The employee was credited with the reply read around the country. And employees had another example of why they should think before they hit “send.”

The e-mail began as a posting on Craigslist.org by a woman whose efforts to find a husband worth half a million dollars a year had stalled at the $250,000 level. Exasperated, she asked with apparent sincerity for some advice on where to find her sugar daddy, concluding: “Most beautiful women are superficial; at least I’m being up front about it.”
Then came the reply that was quickly e-mailed around the Internet and to which the JPMorgan employee attached his signature. The anonymous writer claimed to make $500,000 a year but said the deal was a bad one for him, because “in economic terms you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset.” By 35, he concluded, her looks and therefore her value to him would be greatly diminished. “By 35 stick a fork in you!”

“So in Wall Street terms, we would call you a trading position, not a buy and hold,” he wrote.
 
Rather than propose marriage, he suggested dating. And rather than forward such joke e-mails from work computers, common sense says: Send it from your personal computer, or the joke’s on you.