Monday, March 12, 2007
Polite Proposals?
I’m working on a new handbook for a proposal team at the moment, capturing best practices for each stage of the proposal process.
I forwarded it to the agency who we’ve engaged to convert my own (eminently respectable!) Word pages into a wonderful, professional-looking designer document. Lo and behold, a note popped into my inbox a few moments later:
“The following note has been added by IT Support
We operate a piece of software that scans outgoing emails against a list of profanities (undesirable words). The message you sent;
Subject: Process handbook
Has been found to contain a word (or words) on that list.
Because bona fide business email may contain the occasional profanity, your message has been sent to the intended recipients.”
Try as I may, I can’t find anything rude in the document. But I am rather amused by the fact that the IT folks believe that the occasional profanity is acceptable in the proposal world!
These are hard to find sometimes because we don’t think like a computer. A government agency was trying to send me a document and the server kept locking it out of the system as having profane language. It took us a while, but we finally figured out that because someone graduated from college “Magna Cum Laude”, the document would not go through our filters (note the middle word of that phrase).
Hope this posting goes through.
Great anecdote, David: thanks for sharing. And we’re far too unshockable for our server to hav e bounced your comment!