After hours Toolkit

Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 03 Sep 2004 17:10 BST

Monday 30/9/2004
Bank Holiday. Stuck in bed with cold. Go away - can't you see I'm ill?

But just to keep you happy, here are two press releases from later on in the week that deserve to be more widely circulated…

Orange on the Yorkshire market:

"Further to the Orange release that was sent out this morning, we wish to point out that the header for some of you read as 'TALK NOWT', when it should have read 'TALK NOW'. The extra 'T' appeared due to the trademark ™ sign, not being able to appear in its true form when using applications such as Lotus notes."

IBM on maintaining that oh so important personal relationship between PRs and hacks:

"Subject: *****SPAM***** Two Horse Race Emerges in Storage Market as Surging IBM and EMC Post Share Gains

Dear Journalist

Please find below the 2 latest releases from IBM. The first announcement reports on IDC's latest figures on XXXX and highlights how IBM has continued to gain year on year revenue in external disk storage for the sixth consecutive quarter."

To be fair, IBM's inability to run a mailing list that bothers to even pretend to personally address the emails and its strange habit of writing reports on Australian lager are risible enough. It was our own spam filter that decided to classify the incoming message as such. However, it would save time and delete key wear if IBM were to just mark email messages accordingly before sending them out.