Whoops.
When Jeff White printed his boarding pass, he was more than shocked to find "H8GAYS" was his randomly generated confirmation code, The Washington Post reports.
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"At first I didn't think I read it right," says White, a student at the University of West Florida. "I was worried that another customer might think I somehow picked that code. If I were a gay male, I might have thought that a Delta worker purposely gave me that code, and that would have made me extremely uncomfortable."
Delta was very sorry.
Delta apologized for any “concern or misunderstanding” its code may have caused him.
“These confirmation codes are computer-generated and are completely random,” said Russell Cason, a Delta spokesman. “We will make every effort to ensure that a similar combination does not occur in the future.”
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White, who was flying from Florida to New York by way of Atlanta, said Delta can ensure no one gets a code like that again.
“I’m an IT major, and what surprises me is that they didn’t block [his confirmation code] as a possibility of the string of random numbers and letters in the software they use to generate” the code he says.
“I’m sure they removed many four-letter words that would be seen as offensive. I’m surprised that ‘gays’ and ‘H8’ weren’t blocked as well.”
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