Here’s an interesting project…

This has nothing to do with being a working parent. It’s just a funny story.

We used to have a horrible spam problem. I mean, really horrible. You could easily have 100 emails per day of spam. So, we installed this spam filter, which is fantastic, but there has been one down side - any email with profanity, racial slurs, or sexual overtones are filtered out due to content.

At first, this might not seem like a problem, but you have to remember that we read and consider cutting edge plays, which often have profanity, sexual overtones, or the occasional racial slur. So imagine the frustration when we try to receive new drafts of plays from our playwrights and they keep getting filtered out.

Finally, the staff had enough of this, so I had to configure the filter so that these plays can get through. The funny part of the story is that in order to test the new configuration, I had to write correspondence that included one word of profanity, one sexual overtone, and one racial slur in order to make sure that the emails could bypass the filter. Good taste dictates that I can only give you the test email in “Mad Lib” form:

“If the _______ email doesn’t go through, I’ll ________ myself. Yours,_________.”

Some days, I can’t believe that I get paid to do this job.