Consumerist,I logged online to check my Wamu account tonight and I was surprised by the profanity in the “confirmation number” field.
Highly amusing, don’t you think?
–Brad
Brad,
There is a ghost in the machine. Kill it. Skynet. Help. It’s learning at a geometric rate.
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hehe, you said ‘potty’
Ha ha!
We (big financial company) use 5 numbers followed by 5 letters as Order numbers, but we avoid vowels altogether because we don’t want something like that to happen.
It’s pretty hard to come up with a swear word made entirely of consonants!
The thing that sucks about this is some coder is going to get a pain-in-the-ass assignment of making sure the random confirmation number generator doesn’t do that.
@LorneReams:
It will be a fun assignment. They will need to develop a list of unacceptable letter combinations.
@LorneReams: All they need is a search string for “xxxx”
Or just remove the vowels like Mariallena said.
Sounds like the simplest solution. The ENTIRE world should do this…. just think, no more “Is that an ‘Oh’ or a ‘Zero’ in that number?????”
Then we’d just invent new swear words……….
Fck Frk Tnj……
When I worked for a CE company that OEM’d spell checkers, translators, etc we had a “dirty word” list that every product was checked against. Had to increase the scope of the list to also include “non PC” words the first time we found the “N” word in a translator.
Ah, I long for the days when there were only 7 words you couldn’t include in account verification numbers.
I might work somewhere that creates correspondence to send to customers. We have logic in place to search for specific strings within names/addresses if we have to shorted either for some reason. For instance, if the name of some guy is:
Jacobhammer Rockerhammdyke
…we may have to chop off part of the last/first name to fit on the envelope. We look for certain strings in the resulting name/address to prevent this.
It’s funny to look at the source code, as it’s apparent those strings have been added over a span of time…undoubtedly when somebody complained.
Where did my post go?? Were my ‘non-vowel’ cuss words filtered????
oops – now they are back.
@Mariallena: FVCK!
Ah, the pattern recognition ability of humans is astounding. I bet you understood that. I was originally going to swear in 1337, but you mentioned the numbers and the letters were seperate.
I once found a CD-Key that said …347-5H17… I laughed.
@Mariallena:
True, you can eliminate vowels altogether. But “mthrfckng ccksckr” is just as funny.
I was in a similar situation when coming up with a list of forbidden passwords for a workplace system. I started with the “7 bigs” and then decided to string it out to include these foul words. But in doing so I created a list of foul words that was copied to every database. I feel bad, I should have told my replacement about it because they may stumble upon this trove of profanity and wonder what the heck I was doing. I was always afraid of getting in trouble for even typing the C-word at work…
remember the days of 10+1 digit calculators and entering 55318008, 58008, .1134
those were the carefree days
outrageous!!!!!! DEMAND an apology (and free stuff)!
Nothing is sacred with WAMU. First abuse of customers, now outright having their computers swear at them? What next?!
Ah, the joys of randomness! The odds are 1 out of 456,976.
@ClayS:
That should be easy after they get the assignment.
We sure this isn’t Spitzer’s account, confiming what he was paying for?
I needed a local admin account a few nights ago at work.
these are privleged accounts that are only activated upon request to a select number of technicians.
they are randomly generated.
right in the middle of the 16 char string was the word “Fu(k”
@Ghede: I don’t get it
Wow, this is pretty inane.
I would have printed that off and framed it for posterity.
vowels are also bad b/c zero looks like “O”
I had a receipt that once had “whitey” on it.. I can has fame two?
@thesabre: you’re wrong. It’s funnier, it reads as more urgent.
to the OP:
You seemed more amused than offended. Which is good. I know companies do dumb things all the time, but sometimes we as customers/consumers have to learn to laugh things off now and then.
There was a story in the german Bild newspaper last week or so that someone was highly offended when a captcha test asked him to put “wHitler” in the confirmation field…. it can happen
its just very unlikley
@orielbean: Car VIN codes don’t use I, O, or Q for exactly that reason.
Profanity is in the eye of the beholder. I see a random sequence of 4 letters.
get over it.
@BayStateDarren: +1
Ghede: Oh yea, well you can 347 My 455.
It’s not a random coincidence, but an order to the WaMu employees to breed!
We once dealt with a similar situation. Our company considered creating a black list of words that could not be used in generating customer IDs. We did some quick calculations on the possibilities of a dirty word coming up and considering the chances of someone actually paying attention to it, we decided not to build in a black list.
Searching through the customer database for four letter words was amusing, though.
Uhhh, get the fuck over it, you sensitive fuck?
i heard they were changing their name from WAMU to EFFU.
This story reminded me of something:
I found a hard drive once that had the phrase “CRACKWHORE” in it’s serial number.
@ConsumerAdvocacy1010: true… at least this didn’t get to somebody oversensitive who was sure the bank was out to get him/her
this made my day.
Let’s see here…
It was a one in 456976 chance that the letter portion would have that word, unless they factor in the numbers or whatever else is in that code…
@someguy805: Are you sure it was data in that drive?
@myotheralt: I am unaware of the profanity-related background of the word ‘xxxx’
…50N 04 4 317CH!!
@Ghede: Ahh, Latin. Well FVCK THOV TOO
@arniec: Which “C-word”? Cranberries?
@BayStateDarren: Spitzer? Good thing I didn’t have a mouthful of milk (it would have come out of my nose).
@sam1am: A black list? What about when you print in other colors?
I would like to thank all of the above mentioned and not mentioned for the laugh of the day.
While programming a publisher with my boss, we noted that, since we were taking input from the public, which would be published in the final version, we would have to do some sort of profanity filtering.
Now, this was prior to our company going corporate and needing to protect against mild sexual harassment.
My boss, a genuine gentlemen, looked at me, and told me to leave his desk while he did this, because a lady shouldn’t hear such words. And no, he was not trying to flirt.
What a good guy.
@Mariallena: “It’s pretty hard to come up with swear words made entirely of consonants!”
Dude, what the fck are you talking about? This sht happens all the gddmmnd time, and I can’t fckng stand it!
He he he. Seriously, these numbers are randomly generated by computer. It’s simply a coincidence.
I say we go one step further. Introducing the Swear-o-matic key generator! Randomly assigning the letter of a 4 letter word in their correct place for every segment.
For Example: FHIT-SHCK-FHIN-DHMN
Your chances of an actual swear are increased!
@Ghede: … Why did I use H as the second letter every time? That is odd. The noggin must be acting weird. Think I’ll go to bed now.
We call it a “smut list”.
[dictionary.reference.com]
Definitely necessary when customers are signing in their names to be served, and a list of names displays on a 46 inch monitor…
@thesabre: that made my night
@discounteggroll: Yeah. I think I was in 2nd grade.
@OneBadApple: Home Depot apparently needs one of those too.
Freak occurence.