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.
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?