Telecom New Zealand tells woman her name Gay is "inappropriate"
Wellington - A woman's email to Telecom New Zealand's help-desk was rejected because the company's filter system found her name, Gay, 'inappropriate for business-like communication,' a newspaper reported on Sunday.
Gay Hamilton, of Nelson, admitted that she did happen to be gay but was concerned that the country's biggest public company had spent time and resources deciding that the word was offensive, the Herald on Sunday reported.
"If they do have to put content filters on, then maybe they should ensure that it only gets genuinely abusive words," she told the paper.
Telecom's automated reply to her email 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'.
Public relations spokesman Lenska Papich said the response was triggered by Telecom's internal email monitoring system, which exists to 'prevent misuse of email technologies in the workplace and act as a deterrent to harassment.
'Our systems internally detect a number of words, including both the words gay and heterosexual, that could be deemed as inappropriate for use at work,' she said.
Copyright 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur