What's with the shunting around? HR made you do it?
Muppet with a send-to-all-the-company and without the good sense to protect themselves from too easily using it. Yes, gaffes happen all the time. Sometimes having staff walk out because of HR gaffes is well-deserved, too.
I've resigned where they really didnt want me to go, I've resigned on the spot because enough was enough ("but we didn't mean it that way", they said, but they had let me burn out regardless, and the signs pointed to everyone knowing full well what was happening while they let it happen anyway), I've been reverse-psychologised into talking until my boss made up his mind--he is rather a geek too, so not very smooth with interpersonal relations but at least he tried. All of it more or less in person.
I don't know what I'd do if I got a letter or an email saying to sod off after working in an office for a while. Or, you know, get "escorted" off premises on no notice. I'd be that much more incentivised to sue them essentially because they were being arses in an aggravating manner without taking timely steps to prevent the situation from deteriorating that much. IE they weren't doing their jobs.
We now and then talk about what damage a rogue in IT might do. HR is just as much overhead and if dysfunctional can in its own very special way do massive damage to the company. Like there's this one company in Amsterdam* , that managed to convince me I wouldn't want to work there, I wouldn't want to do business with them, and I won't recommend anything they do; rather the reverse. Exactly and solely because their HR practices are so fscked up.
It just *usually* doesn't blow up as spectacularly as a serious IT gaffe. But that happens, too.
* Doing cluster-y things with GPUs in Amsterdam. They had an opening for someone to help them install their kit while traveling Europe. Answered "must already live in Amsterdam" via a recruiter, while having just hired people from Germany and France, then "don't have enough of what we listed in the advert explicitly as nice to have but /certainly/ not required" talking to them directly. Applicants get at most one chance, usually. They got two, blew it twice. Clear enough.
This might be a reason why recruiters and tech mix so poorly: Techies tend to be literal-minded people, so what others might think of as "white lies" quickly deteriorate into "insults to intelligence". Plus telling people that pride themselves in ability to do hard things other people plain cannot, that they're not good enough, is of course a bit lacking in tact. If you don't understand that, you have no place in dealing with tech personnel in any way or form. Goes for HR, goes for recruiters. I haven't seen a single recruiter yet who even tried to understand that.