MOSCOW, October 15 (RIA Novosti) – In a small triumph of the common man over post-Soviet bureaucracy, an official in Kazakhstan got the boot after using an unprintable word in official email correspondence, local media reported.
Local lawyer Anton Shin has been writing to the regional administration in the Central Asian nation’s southeast for the past 16 months about the timeframe for road repairs in the area, Zakon.kz said Monday.
One of the replies sent to Shin through the e-government service earlier this month came as a word document that added a popular Russian swearword with connotations of stupidity and stubbornness to the file name, the report said. Since the rest of the file name was "reply to Shin" the obscenity turned it into what the recipient took for a direct insult.
The word was not used in the letter’s actual text, but Shin still complained to the Kazakh state watchdog that supervises officials’ conduct.
The offender was fired, and two of his colleagues were demoted for violating the “code of honor for public servants” in the incident, Zakon.kz said.
