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.

You Got Mail - D'OH!!!!

I received an email similar to this at work the other day:

Hiya my little Peach Drop,

Are we doing anything on Saturday? Debbie and Sebbie want to go out for a drink.

Let me know.

Lots of love

Cuteybeauty xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The terms of endearment and other names have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty.

The one person I won’t protect on this one occasion is Mrs PM.

Because she wrote it.

Now while I don’t mind her using pet names in a personal email to me and me alone, I do object when she accidentally adds a group of work colleagues to the distribution list.

I replied with the following email.

Three things:

(1) Yes we are free on Saturday to meet Deb and Sebastian for drinks (does he KNOW you call him Sebbie?).

(2) Did you mean to copy in your entire IT department? 

(3) DID YOU MEAN TO COPY IN YOUR ENTIRE IT DEPARTMENT??????

Yes, I know points (2) and (3) are the same point but it is such an important point that I felt it needed to be made twice. Now your entire IT department knows that you call me “my little Peach Drop” and that I call you “CuteyBeauty”. 

Do you think you will hear the last of this?

Mrs PM replied with something like:

OH SHIT!!!!!!!!

However, her reply never got to me because it fell foul of our profanity filter, a kind of firewall against swearing in emails. The profanity filter is a little like a jobsworth employee who feels that the company will fall apart if it doesn’t throw any emails containing dodgy words into the bin.

Our profanity filter is very keen, so keen in fact that it throws out words that contain dodgy words within them or words that have a meaning that can be either a swear word or not, depending on the context. Words like:

Entity
Scunthorpe
Arsenal
Balls
Dick

If a person joined my company called Richard but preferred to be known as Dick in his emails he would never get any. You can complain to the IT department by sending an email like:

Dear IT,

Can you please configure the profanity filter so that my emails to Dick Scunthorpe and Ed Balls are not thrown out?

Thanks

Plastic Mancunian

The problem is that it will never get past the profanity filter because it contains the bloody words you want to complain about.

Suffice it to say that Mrs PM’s email didn’t get to me. All this goes to show is that email is a dangerous thing, particularly if you don’t proof read it before you send it or carefully check the recipients of the email. Once you have pressed that SEND button, it is too late.

One work colleague sent a personal email to his girlfriend but forgot to remove the formal signature added automatically at the end. It sounded something like:

Hi love,

Can you buy some chicken on the way home? 

Kindest Regards,
Anthony Wallaby
Project Manager

Her reply was something like:

Dear Anthony,

I will procure some chicken for you. Can you obtain a signed purchase order? 

Best regards,
Fiona McNulty
Head of Chicken Procurement

One other trap you can fall into is to accidentally click on the wrong name when sending an email. I once saw an email pop up in my inbox saying something like:

Hi all,

It’s Dan’s stag party on Saturday and I have booked a kissogram for him. She’s a police woman and will “arrest” him in The Hogshead pub at 9pm. Make sure you’re there for it – should be a scream. It’ll cost £5 a head.

P.S. Dan hates kissograms so keep it quiet.

Cheers

Bob

I replied:

Hi Bob,

Did you mean to include Dan on the distribution list?

Cheers

Dave

If Dan had been called Dick, perhaps Bob would have got away with it.

Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, ...

This post is a little crude.

I apologise for that in advance but I feel I need to post about something that has irritated me for the past year or two.

I have two personal email accounts, one for this blog and one other.

The email for for this blog is fairly anonymous and serves to inform me when people have commented on the blog, people who have decided to follow me on Twitter and other fairly mundane stuff.

I get a few emails as you would imagine. However, I get thousands of emails in a folder called Spam.

I feel like I’ve been to this transport café:



I have never used my email account to tell anybody about any problems, even anonymously. Yet I am discovering that people want to help me, in many different ways, to improve my personal life. And they are sending me thousands of emails to tell me.

And these people are persistent, I can tell you.

I don’t ever recall telling anybody that I am having trouble in the bedroom department. And before you start sniggering, I am functioning perfectly.

Yet somebody somewhere feels the need to continually offer me a solution to a non-existent problem, in the form of a little blue pill called Viagra.

And it’s not just one email – its loads of them – from many different sources.

If really did have the problem that Viagra solves, do you think I would send out an email to lots of random people saying:

Hey guys, have you got a cure for erectile dysfunction? I have a real problem with that - and PLEASE don’t tell my mates.

It’s bad enough seeing an email like:

Hey, Plastic, do you have problems between the sheets? We guarantee to give you the power to make a HUGE tent in your bed.

without the ignominy of a mate seeing the email and saying:

Is there something you want to tell us, Dave? Hey lads, it looks like Dave needs some help in the trouser department.

It’s not just Viagra spam. Other emails offer a more drastic solution to problems in that area.

Hey Plastic, do girls laugh at your small winkie? With our winkie extension procedure we can guarantee that you will positively WANT to slowly change your underwear in a room full of hot women. Most will faint and those that don’t will want to jump on you. What’s more, you’ll be so proud that your winkie has turned into a monster that you will want to show it off to your mates.

Change my underwear slowly in a room full of women? Show my mates? I don’t think I could survive either of those without violent pain or eternal savaging.

I’ve heard that the procedure possibly involves a needle or worse.

Why would I even consider such drastic action?

As well as offering bodily enhancements, I have been offered brides from various parts of the world.

Hey Plastic, are you desperately lonely? Do you want to meet Russian women? Or Chinese women? Or Thai women? Or French women? Or American women? Or British women? Or any women from anywhere in the world? We can guarantee that you will meet and marry a voluptuous woman, even if you look like the rear end of a baboon and have the personality of Marvin the Paranoid Android.

And it’s worse than that. These people know where I live.

Hey Plastic, join our dating site and we guarantee you will find the love of your life. We have thousands of HOT WOMEN in the Manchester area ALL dying to meet you.

Presumably if they know I have been receiving emails about erectile dysfunction, winkie extensions and mail order brides they will come armed with Viagra, needles and weapons of pain.

I’m half expecting them to knock on my door asking for a guy called Plastic Mancunian, a name that, when I think about it, makes me sound like some weird pervert.

I would like to just say one thing to anybody who reads this and who happens to send me these spammy emails.

PLEASE STOP!!!!

Your emails only end up in a folder labelled Spam and I delete them without reading them (even though they have amusing titles).

Perhaps I should just change my email address and the name of my blog and the pseudonym I use.

How about one of these?

Rock Hammer

Goliath Fist

Brutus Bonecrusher

None of them are really me and I would bet I would still receive emails like:

Hey Goliath, are you ashamed of your winkie?

Perhaps I should just call myself Chuck Norris. That might work here are some Chuck Norris facts that might deter spammers:

Chuck Norris never sleeps – he waits

Chuck Norris can slam revolving doors

Ghosts are caused by Chuck Norris killing people faster than the Grim Reaper can process them

Chuck Norris can build a snowman out of rain

Chuck Norris doesn’t do press-ups. He pushes the earth down

Chuck Norris can do a wheelie on a unicycle

Chuck Norris died ten years ago but the Grim Reaper is too afraid to tell him

Giraffes were created when Chuck Norris uppercutted a horse

Chuck Norris is the only man on earth who can kick you in the back of the face

Chuck Norris can punch a man in the soul

An important fact I could spread is

Chuck Norris tracks down spammers and makes them eat their own Viagra.

Actually on second thoughts please don’t tell Chuck Norris that a guy called Plastic is trying to use his name; I think I’d rather take my chances with the Viagra.