The Profanity Filter

A couple of years ago I wrote a post about email catastrophes. You can read it here.

I want to draw your attention to the profanity filter I mentioned in that post. The profanity filter is the procedure embedded in the email software that removes any messages that contain swear words.

I sometimes swear. I can’t help it. I find myself punctuating sentences occasionally with words that may offend people but have the effect of totally emphasising the point, adding humour or expressing my distaste for the subject at hand.

I started writing a post about the upcoming election in the UK (YES -  ANOTHER BLOODY ELECTION!!!!) but I had already promised myself that I wouldn’t upset anybody (including me!) with politics and threw it into the cyber bin.

However, the post was full of expletives and insults that would probably have offended people. Ditching it was a good thing. Nevertheless, if I had decided to keep it and send it to my work email address, the message would never have made it into my inbox thanks to the profanity filter.

And this got me thinking – always a dangerous thing!

I have a fantastic idea for a change of career. I want to be the person responsible for programming the profanity filter.

When I think of work emails, the message must run through a chunk of software that analyses every word looking for expletives. In order to identify an expletive, it must check each word against a list of known expletives.

I want to write that list, research that list and add new words whenever they come out.

Can you imagine how much fun that would be? 

It would probably only be a part time job, one day a year – but what a day that would be. New swear words pop into existence every now again, so I would have to hunt them down with the help of Mr Google.

Furthermore, I would also extend it. 

And - just for fun - I could add stupid words just to confuse people!

My job involves a lot of foreign customers, and we send out and receive emails in a variety of different languages. I would love to research the expletives that the Spanish use, for example. I would love to hunt down Polish profanities and add them to the list of disallowed words.

The job satisfaction would be immense – and testing it would be a scream.

All of this leads me onto another little story.

Many years ago at work, before the profanity filter existed on emails, a certain employee noticed that quite a few people were swearing at work on a regular basis. She wasn’t very happy. We had to listen to her because she was our project manager.

I tried to explain that sometimes people swear to diffuse or express their frustration but she wouldn’t listen. I didn’t like to offend her – she is a very nice person – so I suggested that we have an office swear box.

“I will personally look after it,” I said, “and we will have a scale of swear words, charging a small amount for the “safe” ones, rising to more painful fines for the more offensive words.”

She loved that idea, particularly when I suggested that the money would be given to charity at the end of the month.

Even my work colleagues embraced the idea. And I was targetted as potentially the worst offender, because at the time (as I am now in fact) I was a grumpy old git, frustrated by work and life and prone to rants full of expletives.

To get the ball rolling, I had to create a scale of offense.

Without thinking things through, I wrote an email to the entire team with a list of swear words and the cost of using each, ranging from 10p for something inoffensive like bloody rising up to £2 for the worst word of all (you know what word that is). In the interests of good taste, I will not reproduce the email here.

I sent the email to my team.

And promptly got a bunch of replies back, stating that without any shadow of a doubt, the mail I had sent was THE MOST OFFENSIVE email they had ever seen.

The profanity filter we have governing our mails today would have overloaded and melted the email server software had it encountered such a disgraceful message.

Consequently, I was the first contributor to the swear box. I was outvoted. I was forced to pay the fine for each word that I had used and that contribution actually hurt my wallet. But, in the spirit of comradery, I submitted and transferred the cash from my wallet to the swear box to get things going.

I was well and truly hoisted by my own petard!

Worse, one joker decided to print the email off and put it on his desk so that he could police us all. He was fined the equivalent amount because, we argued, that somebody could have intercepted it at the printer. He paid up, but I was thankful that nobody had picked it up at the printer because I’m sure it would have found its way to HR – and it had my name plastered all over it.

However, over the next few weeks, people did contribute to the swear box when they forgot themselves and the project manager was happy. In fact, she was caught out a few times when people heard her swearing under her breath.

It lasted for a couple of months and my contributions were in fact few and far between. The main contributor was a young lad who swore that he would not swear (if you’ll pardon the pun).

We finally got rid of it, when a manager from another area of the building walked in.

“I’m so fucking pissed off with those bastards!” he said.

This caused lots of merriment.

“Put your money in the swear box,” I said. “We don’t allow swearing here.”

“I’m not putting any fucking money in a fucking swear box!” he said before marching out again.

At that point we gave up on the idea but it actually worked – the amount of swearing was significantly reduced.

Looking back at this post, it would have cost me £5.10 had I read it aloud in the office at that time.

I’ll put some money in my own personal swear box here on my desk. Fear not – the money will go to my favourite charity – ME!

I will enjoy the beer I can purchase with it and I promise not to swear in the pub.

The Weapon

There is a song I by Rush called The Weapon and some of the lyrics are particularly relevant:

“And the things that we fear are a weapon to be held against us”

The media thrive on it and also use it to make us (a) buy their paper (because they claim to tell us how it is) and (b) force their political agenda on to us.

Here are some headlines related to Brexit that came from The Daily Express - one of the worst papers on the entire planet:

“New EU Rules Wreck Pensions”

“Each Illegal Immigrant To Cost Us £1million”

“Britain 40% Surge In Ethnic Numbers”

“No Job Unless You’re Polish”

All of these headlines are meant to scare gullible people and persuade them to alter their thinking.

I don’t believe a single word of them. And if you read closely they are written by people with a deep political agenda. Of course, the same is true on the other side of the political spectrum too.

Moreover, fear is used as a means to sell us things that we don’t necessarily need. Salesmen use it all the time. Let me give you an example.

The first property I bought was a brand new three bedroomed semi-detached house that was just a lump of dirt when we actually reserved it from the house building company. We were so proud when we eventually moved in to this brand new estate with similar young people. I was 24 years old.

And then the vultures appeared.

We were swamped by door to door salesmen trying to acquire what little money we had left. One in particular sticks in my mind.

He arrived at 8pm and tried to sell us a burglar alarm. We stupidly let him in and allowed him to demonstrate his device to us. After an hour of his high pressure sales pitch he offered us a piece of paper to confirm the purchase.

“It’s too expensive,” I said. “We’re not interested.”

He was one of those middle-aged salesmen who refuse to take no for an answer. At first he offered us a package where we could pay in monthly instalments and when we refused that, he offered us a deal.

“I can get you 10% off the asking price,” he told us. “My boss will have my guts for garters but I’ll do it for you.”

“What part of “NO!” do you not understand?” said my (ex) wife.

 He tried another tactic.

“Do you care about your family?” he asked me.

I was taken aback by this.

“Of course I do,” I replied.

“It doesn’t seem that way,” he replied. “If your wife came back and surprised a burglar, who knows what could happen? With this alarm, that will never happen because no burglar will get past you front door.”

I didn’t like this one little bit.

“Get out,” I said, now quite angry. “I’m not interested.”

That didn’t deter him. He then started talking about another scenario where my brand new house could be wrecked, my wife injured and my property destroyed.

He was trying to scare us both into giving him money so that our house would be protected. My ex-wife was also not taken in by this. She actually got up, opened the front door and said “Please leave!”

“Are you sure?” he asked me again.

“Yes,” she said, answering for me. “Now go before I call the police.”

She gave him a taste of his own medicine because he said “No need to be like that!” before leaving.

It taught me a lesson about dealing with salesmen, particularly those high pressure types who squat in your house until you sign the bit of paper just to get rid of them.

If you think about it, there are certain companies that use fear to con you into buying things you don’t need. As well as the home security example above, we have things like:

Products that make you look younger. Obviously there are a plethora of anti-ageing products for women that will get rid of those wrinkles but for men we have hair-dye that miraculously turns a decrepit grey-haired old man into an Adonis who has to beat off women with a shitty stick. Like this load of old bollocks:

Products that stop you catching a disease. We all know that if you catch a bad cold, you may need to take a day off work. But certain adverts imply that without their flu remedy you will have to take days off work and probably be sacked as a result. As a hypochondriac, I feel particularly vulnerable when it comes to disease prevention. These bastards are targetting me.

The media. Yes, I know. I feel that I am constantly moaning about the newspaper companies using lies and sensationalist headlines to make us buy their newspapers and even influencing the way people think as I mentioned above. I am certain that they invent stories to scare people and when you actually get down to the nitty gritty of them, there is no substance.

Insurance companies. Mrs PM and I were conned into buying pet insurance for our cats. And then, when I thought about it, and did all the maths, I realised that that I would only save money if the cats became very ill once a year and had to be dragged clawing and screaming to the vet. I am glad that I cancelled it because Jasper and Poppy are now fifteen years old and I shudder when I think about how much pet insurance would have cost in the meantime. There are some insurance policies that you need, for example home and car insurance (but even then home insurance is preying on your fears of being burgled). But do people really need to insure their body parts, for example?

Jennifer Lopez and Kylie Minogue have supposedly insured their arses; Julia Roberts has insured her teeth; Mariah Carey has insured her legs; Dolly Parton and Madonna have insured their boobs; Keith Richards has insured his hands.

I wonder what body part I should insure? Actually, there are no bits of my body worth insuring. At my age, most of it is defunct and drooping now anyway.

Living In The Past

I’m a sceptic and like to judge things based on evidence and not just a belief.

There is one exception to this – and that is God – and the reason for that is fear. I was raised in a Catholic environment with a Catholic priest and teachers who basically told me that if you I dismissed God then I would burn in Hell for eternity with Satan himself using me his demonic plaything.

So let me just say this up front: God exists (I think) and I want to apologise to him (or her) for anything I have done or said against him (or her).

But I digress. For this post, I want to discuss reincarnation.

Believe me, I would absolutely LOVE it if we are incorporeal beings who occupy a human body from the moment of your inception to the moment it gives up, at which point it releases you ready to find another unblemished embryo to occupy.

While I find the idea of reincarnation fascinating, I simply cannot bring myself to take it seriously.

I can imagine that there may be a person reading this who actually believes in reincarnation to the point where they are looking forward to their next life with enthusiasm. If you are such a reader then I welcome your belief and I genuinely hope you are right.

I was reading about a form of hypnotherapy that allows people to regress to past lives, basically accessing the memory of your soul that remembers your previous incarnations. People have, apparently been kings, queens and emperors in past lives and described their lives to such detail that others are convinced of their authenticity.

I tried this.

I was so curious about the idea that I found a past life regression video on You Tube, lay on the bed and followed the instructions.

I fell asleep.

I did have an idea in my head that I was wondering around a village with weird shoes in medieval England and sitting by a blazing fire in a shit-filled hovel.

No fucking throne and palace filled with gold for me. How disappointing!

I woke up and realised that I had actually had a dream. I don’t believe for a second that I was a medieval tramp, living in a flea-ridden squat with only shit and a fire for company.

I then realised that I had been watching an episode of Blackadder II the night before and my dream had cast me in the role of Baldrick, a dumb dolt from Elizabethan times:



If I had watched Braveheart no doubt I would have been William Wallace, a skirt-wearing England-hating vagabond.

A young Plastic Mancunian?

Usually when you hear tales of people somehow tapping into their hidden soul-memory, there is always a something wonderful. They were princesses in Egyptian times or advisors to King Henry VIII. Such people rarely confess to being slaves clearing out the latrines in the middle of a dark-age forest in the pissing rain or native Americans wandering the plains of America or even simple carpenters living in a small town in 18th Century Ireland.

Nevertheless, I live in hope. I am fascinated by the future and I would love to be reborn in fifty years’ time and grow up in a world of technology.

What proof is there that reincarnation is real? Here’s what I found.

(1) 50% of the world’s population believe in reincarnation. The problem I have with this fact is that, really, this means that 50% of the world’s population don’t want to die and, like me, love the idea that we will all be reborn. Belief in something doesn’t make it fact.

(2) People have given names and dates of previous lives, having somehow tapped into their soul-memories, and that evidence has proved to be true. Is this coincidence? Or is it something to do with the fact that the people have somehow “cheated” or, like my hypnotherapy experiment, are really tapping into something they have seen or read? I think the latter. I believe that people are simply remembering something from their past about a person they have encountered in a book or in a movie. As was the case my Baldrick memory above.

(3) One American child, who was two years old, had nightmares about a plane crash, stating that he had been shot down by the Japanese during World War 2. He named the aircraft carrier from which he had taken off and lots more information about the pilot from whom he was reincarnated. When investigated, the two year old boy’s claims were proven to be correct and a person was discovered who fit the description. The boy’s father was an evangelical Christian who simply didn’t believe in reincarnation. Wow! Compelling, eh? But is it just a con or an elaborate hoax?

(4) Still with children – some have been known to speak in languages that they have never learned, supposedly because they spoke that language in a past life.

(5) Children have been born with bullet wounds, supposedly inflicted on the previous human who accommodated their soul.

To be honest, cases (2) to (4) above do make me think that there might be something in it and there are thousands of similar cases. Yet I am still sceptical. If we are all reincarnated, then surely our minds will be full to overflowing with our past lives, including what happened when we died, no matter how horrific that was.

The more I think about this, the more questions I have. For instance, our souls that have travelled through time for centuries, finding a new body every so often, must have been “born” somehow – and by the same token must “die” sometime, unless our souls are immortal.

Presumably, before humans existed we must have lived in the bodies of animals.

Do you think I could have been a Tyrannosaurus Rex in a previous life?

I really hope so. That would have been a fantastic adventure.

However, the thing that has convinced me more than anything that reincarnation is impossible is the belief of one person.

Yes – that’s right. David Icke believes in reincarnation and he is as mad as a bag of badgers. He believes that reincarnation is a slavery program and our souls are transferred from one slave to the next by “gods”. His view is that we are like the batteries in the Matrix with these nameless “gods” feeding off our souls.

Trust Mr Madman to apply his lunacy to reincarnation. Perhaps he took the Matrix too seriously. Perhaps he thinks he is Neo – or “The One”. Who knows?

Over to you, dear reader.

Do you believe in reincarnation?

If you do I would love to hear from you – either in this life or the next.

The Ten Commandments Of Flying

I have flown a lot. I can tolerate short haul flights (up to three hours in duration) but I genuinely hate flying long haul. Even the excitement of reaching an exotic and interesting location cannot haul me out of the depths of despair at the prospect of spending twelve hours on a metal tube with wings.

Don’t get me wrong – I am not afraid of flying. I just hate it because it is so dull and uncomfortable.

However, the tedium of flying can be improved by following one of the ten commandments that I have just created.

If you are ever unlucky enough to find yourself on an aircraft sitting next to a grumpy blonde baboon with a hybrid Mancunian/Black Country accent then our mutual of enjoyment of the flight will be guaranteed if you follow the following guidelines.

1. Thou shalt not talk to me during the flight unless it is an emergency. 

Don’t get me wrong – I am a nice guy and willing to talk to most people. And I will allow a few words to be exchanged at the start or the end of the flight. However, if you are a talkative person and want to spend the next twelve hours engaging me in conversation about your life and experiences –JUST DON’T.

I speak from bitter experience.

One guy on a flight back from Europe told me that the book I was reading was rubbish and then proceeded to tell me the ending even when he saw that I was halfway through the thing.

“Ditch it!” he said. “Read something else.”

“I only have this book,” I said through clenched teeth.

“You’ll thank me,” said the prick.

“Okay!", I said. "Thanks for ruining the book and my flight!”

2. Thou shalt not grab my hand during turbulence or tell me that you are scared of flying all the way through the flight.

Related to the above, I was on a four hour domestic flight next to a guy about my age. As the plane took off, he turned to me and said. “I’m terrified of flying.”

I told him that flying was a doddle and he should relax. And for a while he did – until we hit turbulence about an hour into the flight. He grabbed my hand and said “That’s not normal!”

I tried to reassure him that it was but he wouldn’t have it. The remaining three hours were interrupted with shakes and bumps and he spent all of that time telling me in a variety of ways just how terrified he was. I could do nothing other than spend that time as a simian counsellor.

He thanked me at the end for being “a rock” but the truth is I almost asked to be moved. And my poor hand hurt. And the other passengers probably thought we were a couple.

3. Thou shalt not attempt to climb over me while I am asleep on a long haul flight.

I would rather you wake me up rather than wake up to find you straddled across me on your way out.

On a long haul flight, any moment you can sleep is a gift from God.

However, I am a light sleeper and any movement from the seat next to me wakes me up. So imagine my surprise when on a ten hour flight to South Africa, I awoke to find the lovely young lady next to me, straddled across me as she tried to get across without waking me. She was embarrassed, I was embarrassed and the rest of the flight was totally awkward.

Worse, the same thing happened with a rather large gentleman who actually fell on me when the plane hit turbulence. I’m glad the other passengers found that amusing.

I didn't!

4. Thou shalt not invade my personal space with any part of your body – particularly with your elbows during eating.

There is nothing worse than having your food knocked off your fork when a space invader knocks your elbow at the most inopportune moment.

5. Thou shalt not fall asleep on my shoulder and drool all over me.

I’d also like to add “or snore in my face with your bad breath” to this.

6. Thou shalt not be rude to the stewardesses.

I am genuinely in awe of stewards and stewardesses and the job they do and I try to accommodate them and be nice during the flight. However, if you are rude because they haven’t got the “right wine” or if you try to ask the stewardess on a date upon landing because she has been “especially nice” to you (and therefore simply MUST fancy you) then you are a prick.

7. Thou shalt not push your fat belly in my face whilst trying to get your bag from the overhead locker.

This is worse than having you personal space invaded by an elbow. Once a man reached up and as he did so, his T shirt rose revealing a bloated, hairy fat gut that he then proceeded to ram into my face. I almost used the sick bag. He didn’t even apologise, the prick.

8. Thou shalt not throw a book at my face.

Actually, I did this to a fellow passenger. I was boarding the flight and he was in the aisle seat. “I’m there,” I said pointing to the window seat next to him. I then threw my book to my seat but my aim was terrible. I hit him full in the face, corner first, and he yelled in pain. Worse, the book drew blood on his forehead.

I was mortified and so apologetic that I was willing to prostrate in front of him and be his slave for the rest of the short flight. He was absolutely fine and after a quick visit to the toilet to stem the flow of blood he simply said “Accidents happen. Don’t worry about it.”

He was pissed off with me by the end of the flight though because I broke commandment number one and apologised to him continuously through the flight.

What a prick I was.

9. Thou shalt not complain that the seat is too small and that the seat belt does not fit.

I don’t mind fat people. I don’t mind sitting next to fat people on a flight. What I do mind is sitting next to belligerent fat people who complain that “the seat is too small” and that “real people don’t fit in seats”. I am a real person and the seat fits fine.

10. Thou shalt make every effort to sit at the other end of the aircraft if you have a baby.

I pity people with babies who have to fly. But I have suffered with them. I once found myself sitting next to a couple with a baby on a long haul flight and the small beautiful bundle of cuteness suddenly lost all of its adorability when the aircraft took off.

For the next eight hours, it mutated into a screaming explosion of noise accompanied by vomit and shit exploding from its orifices. I didn’t get a wink of sleep and I felt sick. I wanted to be away from them but I couldn’t because the plane was rammed to overflowing. Now I know where babies are usually located, I always try to select a seat as far away from them as possible. It doesn’t always work.

And finally ...

Of course if you know me – and I like you – then you are exempt from most of the above rules. However, if you are Mrs PM or a male friend and suddenly present me with a baby during the flight I can guarantee that I will probably freak out in a highly disturbing but amusing way.