Beast's emailed invite is a joke

FAMOUS BACKFIRING jokes of our time? This just happened when the Beast of Redmond's PR guru, Weber Shandwick, sent the INQ an invite to meet and greet the bigwigs of Microsoft's cellular division.

The invitation is to the forthcoming mega mobile phone show, MWC (Mobile World Congress), in Barcelona next month. Except the invite doesn't actually work.

Unfortunately, the Outlook appointment file attached to the invite was totally borked. Obviously, it wasn't very carefully scrutinised and hadn't been formatted properly.

Consequently the actual calendar (.ics) file which had been attached to the original message is nothing short of a joke. For starters, it gets the start time of the event completely wrong.

Worse still it actually contains the words "Blah, blah, blah" as well as a URL for a site which this INQ hack hasn't previously visited.

The link takes you to Foo.com which stands for Four-one-one - a US based telephone number search engine

The irony is that the INQ had calculated that, if anybody knew how to insert the full details of a meeting into an Outlook Calendar listing, it would be Microsoft.

We probably wouldn't have downloaded the .ics file otherwise. The INQ is now looking forward to a corrected version. µ