Friday, Sept. 15, 2006 6:05 p.m.
Dear Amazon,
I am sorry I sent you a rude email today. It was not my fault. It was your fault. But still I feel the need to apologise in person.
You only let me have 3 options, you see, for the email subject line. And the only one of those options which wasn't completely unrelated to my problem was "Where's My Stuff?"
Given a free choice, I'd rather have called it something polite and neutral, like "My Recent Order, Number ###blahblah," or "A Problem With Postage?" or, I don't know, "Excuse me...". I mean, don't get me wrong, I love writing letters of complaint; it's my favourite modern literary form, even more than the totally-innocent-yet-also-very-clearly-flirtatious-by-the-very-fact-of-its-having-been-written-at-great-length-to-someone-you-actually-hardly-know email. Perhaps even more than the Cute Overload Squee. Sometimes, I write letters of complaint when nothing's gone wrong, just to keep in practice.
But the first rule of rude correspondance is "Never Be Rude". That way, you never have to look like a neanderthal who is not really worthy of acceptable goods and/or services, or piss off the innocent operative who has to deal with the general public, and is therefore at the bottom of the corporate food chain and justifiably quite pissed off to begin with. I mean, I would never barge into your office and announce my presence with "Where's My Stuff?", now, would I? Ask anyone who knows me. (Well, ask most of them. Some of them have seen me in a bad mood, and some of them lie.)
So, if I may make a small suggestion: any sentence whose sense would not be altered by the insertion of the word "motherFUCKING" is likely to be excessively abrupt, and I'd rather you didn't oblige me to use it to your doubtless very nice and personable and competent e-peons.
Just a motherfucking thought, is all.
Yours,
Loris
Pissed Off Loris - Saturday, Feb. 24, 2007
Swotty Loris - Thursday, Jan. 18, 2007
Mimetic Loris 2006 - Tuesday, Dec. 26, 2006
Psycholoris - Thursday, Oct. 26, 2006
Cunning, Linguistic Loris - Tuesday, Oct. 24, 2006