SKIRMISHER

If your name has a funny connotation to it, sending an email to Telecom New Zealand’s help desk may be an exercise in futility, as it has been designed to reject anything that has a hint of “gayness.”

Take the woman named Gay Hamilton, who had emailed the telecom giant and received the automated reply that said the message “was identified by our content filtering processes as containing language that may be considered inappropriate for business-like communication.” It confirmed that the offending word was “gay.”

Telecom spokesman Lenska Papich said the response was triggered by the company’s internal email monitoring system, which prevented “misuse of email technologies in the workplace and act as a deterrent to harassment.”

Now we know why, for some reason, sending the help desk our query “Have you met the Fockers?” is no good either.

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