620 words
Two more encounters with corporate 'communication' in the past days. The first was actually a happy occasion. It's been more than four months but eventually I received my 'nutella scraper' (spreader?) through the mail. In fact, the company had sent me a letter in March or so already, apologising for the delay – and my friends had started chuckling that I'll never receive the damn thing. But now it's here and I'm al joyous and happy. It's bigger than I thought (but not magnetic) and of course will drive my nutella consumption to new heights (did you know 100g of nutella contain more than 400 kcal?).
Anyway, those two letters I received from the company were completely phoney corporate gobledeegook. All those profound excuses in the first one that they're really as unhappy as I am about not being able to ship the thing now. And the second one – in a completely different style on a completely different letterhead – is a magnificent exercise in brand presentation. All of the text is written in ordinary black, just the nutella logo is in its usual colours throughout the text giving it (many) colourful spots to put it positively.
All in all, I found this amusing. After all it's just a little promo for a little bit of metal. Do they really expect me to be really upset because of the delay (well, I would have been 20 years ago)? And if so, why did they only start apologising three months after I sent my receipt in to the promo thing? Finally, do they expect me to beleive they are sorry about all this? Um, I don't know.
The second culprit is our favourite Deutsche Telekom. They have this online billing thing which is pretty poor (but a least works in Safari by now – although I don't know whether that is due to website or Safari updates) and triggered me to write Rechnungs Checker a while ago. The whole service is pretty crappy, not documented and so on.
Anyway, when splitting up our phone bill this month I realised that the total sum of calls the complete bill shows was different from the sum you (or Rechnungs Checker) get when summing up all the items of the itemised bill. First I thought there was a bug in Rechnungs Checker or – even more likely – yet another quirk in their file format that caused some calls to be omitted while reading the file. But that was not the case. Those calls simply weren't listed. So I told them. And quickly received a polite answer.
The upshot of which was 'sorry, we don't have access to that information ourselves, please contact the provider in question directly to get it'. While this answer may be correct formally and legally it just isn't helpful at all. What's the point of electronic itemised billing if I have to run around and gather all the information myself? Taking this lightly, I jokingly asked them whether they were seriously expecting me to follow up on this. And they again answered quickly and politely that that's what has to be done.
Those companies just have no sense of humour. They hardly have any sense at all. Whatever they or their employees write sounds lifeless and phoney. Why can't they do simple things like saying 'we know this is ridiculous but our lawyers couldn't do any better'? Which would be an answer that is both truthful and acknowledging that there is a problem. Instead they just go on stating the status quo, suggesting that it is Good the way it is.
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