There’s quite a lot in a name. It’s your identity, it’s your family history and ancestry. It’s something that’s uniquely “you”, even if it’s incredibly common like “John Smith”.

I think that Dr. Herman I. Libshitz would agree with this. He had tried to upgrade his dial-up internet services to DSL but when he got to the part where enter you name and create an e-mail address, Verizon wouldn’t accept it because of an overzealous profanity filter.

He spent a bunch of time talking to assorted people at Verizon and ended up deciding to stay with his AT&T dial-up. Then his story was in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Suddenly verizon decides to make nice and allow him to use his name in the email address.

I am not a hamster, I get it that it’s a sad fact that profanity filters are needed but there’s such a thing as being reasonable about it and giving customer service reps the ability to override them and make exceptions in cases like that of Dr. Libshitz.

I wonder if he’s going to get an apology that’s as public as the problem turned out to be?

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