I rarely used out of office email alerts before, since when I received an email it could either wait, or I’d take care of it promptly, regardless of where I was. But with the company I am working for now, it is good to have this function, since it enables me to notify HQ when I am not available to them, or in which country I am, without having to email a hundred people. And since I travel on a weekly basis, it is good. However, the service provider we use is quirky at best, and when I include myself to the list of recipients, I get a copy of the alert — or more than one if I email myself several times. Bleh.
However, this is not the worst. I received today one of those alerts and was surprised by a very bad typo. I may not be native in English, but unless I am very tired, or drunk, and even then, I usually don’t misspell or make obvious grammar mistakes. So I was very surprised to see this:
Hello Earth? Could we get back to Squirrel Mail [blech!] and fix that, like now? So off I went, and look at that: It IS correctly spelled in the original version…
The Sentence underlined in blue reads Changes are not updated automatically. They have to be validated by customer support. Which needs that somebody at our provider reads — and apparently feels quite happy to correct fuck up alerts just because he thinks he’s right! This web interface we have is not UTF-8 by the way, but Latin-1 or whatever, which means that when I type non-latin characters, they get foobared too. Merci la France!
