(MONEY Magazine) – Talk about a Freudian bad dream. In January, Charles Freude, a 38-year-old engineer at the University of Oklahoma's power plant, lost his job of 11 years because he accidentally misaddressed a tasteless e-mail.

Freude's nightmare began on Dec. 12, when he tried to dash off a message to his co-worker and friend of 20 years, Tom McCain. Included in the e-mail was an explicit reference to a dirty practical joke he and McCain had once pulled that involved a crude photo of a nude woman. The e-mail was extremely ill-timed, since the staff had recently undergone a sensitivity training session that discussed the treatment of women in the workplace.

Freude misspelled McCain's address, and the note wound up with the power plant's e-mail postmaster. Then, despite having promised plant workers that he would reroute any misaddressed e-mail, the postmaster sent copies of Freude's message to at least 12 university officials. On Dec. 17, Freude was called into his department head's office and presented with two options: He could resign or be fired effective Jan. 2. Freude refused to resign.

"I asked my department head what he was doing looking at my mail," Freude recalls. "He said he could look at anyone's mail any time he wanted." On Feb. 19, a university employee grievance committee voted to reinstate Freude, noting that the school had not properly warned him about what types of e-mail should not be sent. Three days later, however, the vice president for administrative affairs overturned the ruling. The university won't comment on the case. Says Freude, who has been unemployed since January: "I just wish they would have told us to be careful about what we write."

--J.E.R.