Imagine that you have an online retailer who sells, let’s say, groceries. They fulfil all orders from their own warehouse. You place an online order which includes a bag of flour. When your shipment arrives, you find that instead of flour, you have been supplied with 2kg of Cocaine. When you protest, the supplier apologises, insisting that it was a computer error and you were supplied with the wrong item.
Now, I don’t know about you, but there is no possible scenario I can imagine which explains the error away properly. Yes, there may well have been a computer glitch. But how do you explain the Cocaine in the first place?
On a related note, I saw this story on the BBC website. Apparently, the London School of Economics (LSE) sent out a welcome email to its students – 25% of whom are East Asian – and some “test names” from the database resulted in people being identified as Kung Fu Panda.
The university says that other test names used include Piglet, Paddington, Homer, Bob and Tinkerbell.
Yes, but there’s no mention of people being identified by those names. More telling is this bit:
The use of this ‘name’ merely reflects that a member of staff who set up the test record is a fan of the film.
It’s an odd name to choose. Joe Bloggs or John Smith are the ones I usually go for. I’d steer well clear of double-barrelled monikers if I were testing a database. They also say:
The email was sent to all students and did not target students from any particular background.
The article doesn’t mention any non-Asian examples. What I do know is that Asian students usually turn up a week or two earlier than everyone else (I’ve mentioned this before). Maybe Finding Nemo is in that database somewhere, too?