Opinion: When my client's porn spam detector erroneously blocked my invoices, I turned to Acrobat to save the day.My Friday started out innocently enough, until my accountant told me that a favorite client for whom I write album and music DVD reviews (under a pseudonym) hadn't paid me since August. But all's well that end's well: PDF saved the day by solving the problem that was holding up my check.
I've done a fair amount of work for this client, an entertainment site with more traffic than Billboard: Current stats show this site draws 5 million unique monthly visitors and 70 million page views per month—not half bad in this era of content specialization and heavy competition for entertainment eyeballs.
They're doing pretty well. So you could imagine the mild annoyance I felt when I found out they appeared to have blown off my November invoice. I quickly sent in another invoice Friday itemizing every review I'd written since August, CC'ing it to the usual suspects: My boss, his boss, their accountant, and my accountant.
The freelance life can be that way. Even with the best clients, sometimes you go three months between paychecks. It's not written into the deal, but it's a very real cost of doing business for ourselves. Most of us out here understand that if we don't like that part of our jobs, we can always go back to the office.
But nine months between checks? That was ridiculous. And it turns out they were getting annoyed with me for what they thought was waiting nine months to invoice and being slovenly about my own accounting. The emails over this started flying back and forth, and, well, you know how emails can get. After many emails (some heated) pointing fingers, we figured out what was going on.
To wit, the following items for which I wrote reviews had a couple things in common:
--The Queers Are Here DVD
--The Queers: Munki Brain CD
--American Hardcore soundtrack CD
--Pogues: Rum, Sodomy and the Lash CD
--Pogues: Hell's Ditch CD
The first thing they had in common was that they featured old time punk bands. The second thing was that these old punk bands got, er, a little in your face with their band names and album titles. While none of these works were pornographic in content, they all had words the accounting firm's porn-spam detector misidentified as—and I quote—"offensive."
(Just to get something straight, the Pogues were referencing Winston Churchill, who once said, "Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash.")
Apparently, whoever programmed the mail filters never slam-danced, moshed, pogo'ed or learned to appreciate the nuances of Spider Stacy's tin whistle. Because of that, the accounting guy cutting the checks never got my invoice emails. They just died out there in the ether.
It took a while to figure all this out, but after everyone stopped yelling at each other, we had a laugh. It's always great to blame those infernal computers at the end of the day and go home with a clear conscience, especially when emails are the main method of communication and things, at time, can get serious.
You're still waiting for the PDF punch line—and here it is: How did we get my itemized invoice past the porn filter so the accounting folks could just do their jobs and keep track of what I'd been paid for? PDF. I just PDF'd my email, attached it to a minimal-text email and hit "send."
That broke the bottleneck. Another office paperwork problem solved with Acrobat. Another client fence mended. The workflow's no longer broken. Yay, PDF!
Adobe should be proud, in a way. Anyone who needs to defeat porn firewalls —- say, actual porn merchants pushing queer hardcore sodomy content like the offending spam filter in this story thought I was doing -- need look no further than Acrobat. All it takes to circumvent these gatekeepers (at least some of the time) is creating a PDF. Now that's what I call technological innovation!
In fact, I'll even give Adobe a tagline to spice up their Acrobat 9 advertising campaign, which I'm sure exists already in rough-sketch form: "Lob it over the firewall with Acrobat. The online porn smuggler's hack of choice."
What a country we live in. As Bill Scheft always closed his "The Show" column in Sports Illustrated: My time is up. You've been great. Enjoy The Pogues.
Document Management 
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