Taking the ASS out of Assault since 2009

I know I said I wouldn't write much because of the tiny lil keyboard I'm using, but I felt this deserved an update.

Just about everyone has dealt with this at work at some point or another: the thing that won't go away no matter what you do. Maybe it's an account, maybe it's a person, maybe it's that pesky harassment complaint. Whatever is is, the more you want it to go away, the worse it gets.

For me, it's been this one account. What should have been a minor issue that would take a day or two to fix took close to two weeks. Nothing was every easy and it just kept getting more annoying. All I wanted was for it to be done, and yesterday I finally thought it was.

But OF COURSE it wasn't ... out of nowhere I got an e-mail from a sales rep about one seemingly easy last thing. This account's ads on our website needed to have the one sentence tagline they could edit changed back to what it used to be. Usually we just tell the customer to change it, but because of all the problems I offered to do it. Was it easy, of course not.

What seemed like a relatively innocuous statement was getting blocked by our system's profanity/offensive language filter, and I had no f*cking idea why. Then I thought maybe it was the word violence, so I took that out, and it still wouldn't take. I was ready to throw things, but instead I relatively calmly emailed somebody who runs the system asking why it wouldn't post and telling the sales rep the changes wouldn't be done when I said they would.

The next day I found out the problem, it wasn't that our filter was super sensitive and was picking up violence. Instead, the system was reading the word assault, seeing ASS and shutting down the whole thing. We were able to work around it, but I also had to e-mail my boss and my boss's boss explaining that this issue would take the rest of the day to fix because our system couldn't differentiate an ass from an assault in the ground (that doesn't work and isn't really that funny, but I'm leaving it).

These are the kinds of things I deal with on a daily basis. And tomorrow is another day; a day of all day training about how to train other people. Perfect.

Listening to: Village Idiot Radio on Pandora
About to: Watch some awful TV and sleep