It has often been said that humans can make mistakes, but to truly wreak havoc, technology is necessary. Although true, a recent awkward situation with U.K. retailer Marks & Spencer — that the chain blamed on technology — really has the smell of not only a human, but a mischievous one at that.

What happened on the M&S site defies easy explanation without using words that Computerworld won’t allow, but the image captures in this story from The Standard make it all clear. The page displayed brightly colored letters, presumably to be used as holiday decorations. When someone searched for red letters (the most popular holiday color) and asked to display them by price (the most popular query limiter), the letters approximately spelled out an old Anglo-Saxon verb, commonly considered vulgar and not printable on this website, with the direct object “me” following on another line. The suggestion seemed to be that the shopper should engage in intimacy with … well, I don’t know, the retailer, I guess.

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