Hot on the heels of the NOH8 anniversary party comes word of a little “H8” screw-up at Delta. Yes, that’s right, an airline doing something to annoy a passenger. Pick your jaw up off the floor.
According to the Washington Post, an IT student from Florida got a boarding pass with “H8GAYS” printed right next to his name. Ohhhhh geez.
Delta, for their part, sent him an apology. (It’s unclear if he had to get the Post involved first in order to prod a response out of them.)
The codes are randomly generated, and like a million monkeys at a million typewriters, it was only a matter of time before someone got an unfortunate string.
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
But the issue raises two important questions:
First, why does anyone fly any airline other than Virgin? (Yeah, yeah, we know, it doesn’t go to every city. Still, it’s so vastly superior to all other airlines that it’s almost worth it to fly into a major airport and then rent a car to drive 200 miles to your final destination.)
And second, why was Delta so bad at filtering out bad strings? We assume that they’ve set up their software to filter out words that might raise an eyebrow like “PISS” or “JEWS” or “BOMB,” so how did “H8” and “GAYS” slip by them?
jwrappaport
Thank you for the Virgin America plug. It has the class, service, and sexy pilots of Pan Am with the wit and whimsy of Southwest.
rickhfx
They never had the n word just pop up by mistake? Sounds like someone or some programer was to fault.