Two weeks ago my boss decided that he wanted any e-mail containing George Carlin's 7 Dirty Words blocked from coming in or out of the company. In vain, Sparky and I tried to explain that the salespeople like the use of those words for shmoozing over e-mail with potential clients, and that the president of the company uses his e-mail (or rather has his secretary use his e-mail), exclusively for the dissemination of dirty jokes. He didn't care. His response was, roughly, "What if a female employee receives an obscene e-mail and sues us for sexual harrassment?" If anyone knows of a case where a female employee has sued after receiving an e-mail with the word shit in it, please let me know as soon as possible at withshoes@hotmail.com. This is, incidentally, a company, where my exit interview was concluded with the president commenting "[My psuedonym, once I decide on one], let me know if you want to fuck this girl [that's about to walk into the office]. You want to fuck this girl, I'll set it up." I did not bring this up at the meeting. Currently, we are researching the technical feasibility of filtering the mail for some employees but not for others.

The reason of course, that the office manager wants this mail banned from the system is that he gets huge amount of porn spam, even with our industrial strength spam filter in place. No one else gets porn spam in the company. Furthermore, the office manager wouldn't have a problem with the porn spam if he didn't open all the messages with the subject "Watch me and my boyfriends on our new webcam " and then acted shocked that they are not related to the plastics industry. Because the office manager (clever nickname coming soon) is a Jehovah's Witness who seems to have an endless supply of CD-ROMs of the Watchtower hanging around the office, I do not bring this up to him.

Currently, I'm hoping he forgot about the project.