Dear Blog Readers,
We have become the kind of blogger we never wanted to be — the kind who has a "read our blog" button on our website but the newest post is months old. We blame Facebook for this — it's so much easier to write something there and we seem to have more followers there than we did here on the blog. Still, we can't quite bring ourselves to give it up altogether yet — so instead, we're posting this little note to explain our lack of current entries. Please do check out our facebook page, we think it's fun, if not quite as long form.
sincerely, the Joie de Blogger.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Our Unacceptable Message

We have an email list and on the first of every month we mail them a link to our monthly news. Each time a few bounce back, old email addresses, or undeliverable for some reason but this month we had a first - we got one back for this reason: "Because the message contains inappropriate language that violates the Boston Public Schools Acceptable Use Policy(AUP) for Computer Networks. If you believe there is no inappropriate language AND the message is AUP compliant, please REPLY to this email and request that the message be released, and your request will be considered." I didn't even think twice - I wrote the text and I was 100% positive that there was no unacceptable language in our email. So I re-sent it. It came back again with the same message. I then decided to take a closer look at what I had written. Here it is - the preamble to our actual newsletter: "Dear Joie de Vivre mailing list, We wanted to let you all know that because it’s been a hard winter and we needed a little cash, we have sold our mailing list to QVC . com — we hope you don't mind. APRIL FOOL! (We of course will never ever ever give your names to anyone). Happy Spring! We’re loving looking out our window at pussy willows instead of Xmas greens buried under dirty, icy, snow. And loving seeing more of you come in the door... it’s much more fun here when we have customers!" And when I took a closer look, I realized what must have happened. Their screen must have picked out the X in Xmas, the dirty in dirty, icy, snow - and of course, the pussy in pussy willow and thus decided that our email was inappropriate. It's the only thing that makes any sense . . . . and it reinforces my belief that machines with all their artificial intelligence will never be able to do what we lowly humans can do with our brains!

1 comment:

  1. Kathryn Hepburn coudn't have said it with such eloquence.
    I love this story.

    ReplyDelete