The following is a real complaint email I sent to a small New York interior design company who (depending on the outcome) shall not, for the moment, be named. Years in front of a keyboard hammering out jaded responses to customers who allow themselves to be angry, often without rhyme or reason, seemingly conditioned to weasel and coerce CS representatives into getting what they want, when all they had to do was either ask nicely, give me something amusing to read, or simply not be from New Jersey. Damn straight I'm always more than happy to lend a hand either way. So how do CS reps communicate when they, themselves have been slighted either by a bad product or by bad customer service? I still adhere to the notion that I complain the way I would like to be complained to. Though appreciated, I don't expect a resolution because the world is an imperfect place, and I recognize that. I also recognize how positively exhausting it is to be angry over something not of my own doing.
Hence, the following email was thoughtfully henpecked out after coming home from work and being greeted by the strangely vacant patch on my wall:
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| insert poster here |
Dear friends,
Let me preface the below by stating I was admittedly pretty excited to finally find a nice looking frame at my local record shop with which to hang a sentimental tour poster on my wall. Despite not being a rap star or pretentious "social media entrepreneur" with completely oppressive amounts of disposable income, I didn't balk at the $40 price tag because I've always been more than happy to support clever homegrown design that creates a solution which is both simple, and elegant. Harnessing the mysterious geological power of magnets to hang a poster? That shit's bananas, for real. So, kudos on that and stuff.
Ok, you may kindly stop patting your own backs. Enough said about my aforementioned perceptions, because while this frame is great on paper, it's been way less than great on my wall. The frame hadn't even enough time to gather a thin layer of dust in my dilapidated soot-farm of an apartment and it's totally failed already. User error you suspect? Highly unlikely. I have a fourth grade education, and despite being no Bob Vila, am pretty damn sure I've been gifted with the presence of mind to drive a poster nail into drywall by means of a blunt object other than my own forehead. So alas, it was not my ridiculously awesome hammer swinging skills that did it in, but the abject and unsurprising failure of the pathetic adhesive affixing the wooden mounting strip to the reverse side of the upper metal frame. That's the photo attached to this email [picture above] by the way, in which you can see just a naked wall - shamed and vulnerable, where my poster hung proudly for the better part of 72 hours. Waiting for Wild America reruns, I've sat through shameless PBS telethons that clung to the airwaves for longer. In its place, the now lonely, yet properly mounted wooden strip, reaffirming my unequivocal poster hanging skills. Surely several smallish pieces of wampum off the pile from the asking price for the frame could have gone towards something stronger than double-sided duct tape, but that's clearly asking for too much. I mean, who am I kidding? $40 for design revolutions employing advances such as an adhesive tape with two dubiously viscous sides is a total bargain which I'm clearly too dense to recognize. Still, not nearly dense enough to happily swallow the cost of such technological luxuries in the 21st century, but I digress.
So the poster is sadly going back in its tubular coffin, and the now implausibly, and astronomically expensive poster frame is in dire need of a krazy-glue carpet bombing run, or more logically, a run to the recycler's. More inclined towards the latter because I can't be arsed to travel the additional three blocks further south to the hardware store, and $40 is already grossly more than enough to spend on a great idea, but slipshod execution.
Many kind thanks for allowing me a moment to whine.
- the di
That being said, if the company wants to respond, they most certainly may, though I don't expect it. I've already amused myself (and hopefully whomever answers their queue) by speaking my part and thereby made peace with an unfortunate purchase. Like I said, living in a messy world, I find it sad that some people are able to devote the time and energy necessary to remain butthurt for longer than the scant few moments it takes to pitch something into the trash, or hang up the phone. Playing the victim is savory and cathartic indeed, I know, but we can't all be victims. In CS, it's hard to force oneself to give a shit when being ordered around, with regard to the arm-twisting or guilt trips that usually accompany a poorly composed rant replete with atrocious spelling and elementary grammar. This life, with all its glorious imperfection, is still not some giant toilet of a suggestion box to fill with hastily, and poorly composed diatribes. Besides, that's what Twitter is for.
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