I wish to draw your attention to…
One of the lighter sides of sorting out all my late mother’s effects 13 years ago was going through the copies of letters of complaint she had written over the years. Most of them were in relation to faulty consumer products she had bought: a jar of Marmite had not been properly sealed and might have been tampered with, her letter informs me. A packet of well-known washing detergent had been supplied without the measuring dispenser which the outside packaging had assured her would be found upon opening. Her cat had been sick after eating a tin of its favourite food brand, and having inspected the contents carefully my mother had been convinced that the food was not sufficiently fresh.
Each of these letters is perfectly set out to the template my mother was taught at Pitman’s Secretarial College all those years ago. ‘You see’, she would say to us all, ‘I was trained’. I used to muse gently as to what she had been trained for. She certainly knew when to end a letter with a ‘Yours faithfully’ as opposed to a ‘Yours sincerely’, so maybe that was the goal. I was also fascinated with the fact that she chose to keep the copies, long after, we hope, the error had been rectified by the manufacturer/supplier.
Who on earth puts pen to paper or fingers to keyboard to write a letter of complaint nowadays? The cost of postage alone probably means that you’ll never get your money back. I doubt whether anyone still writes to ‘The Managing Director’. However, I was quickly proved wrong when a quick web search entitled ‘how to write an effective complaints letter’ generated numerous examples, so clearly the art is not yet dead.
But now that every organisation is represented throughout the social media network, we can choose simply to email our irritation to an anonymous info@company.com. Or we can go public and tweet our complaint to the world, or put it on the company’s Facebook/Instagram page. Hotels and travel companies go pale and shudder at the mere mention of TripAdvisor.
Unfortunately, articulating complaints or even expressing an opinion in the virtual world has taken a very nasty turn. This seems particularly true if the person choosing to express that opinion is a high-profile woman. The trolling and threats to numerous women in the public eye are both horrifying and sickening. We certainly pay a high price for the social media cloak of anonymity, and I for one am keen to shed it whenever possible. How sad that in a world where transparency is the goal, we find such murkiness.
Oddly, among my mother’s papers I couldn’t find any actual replies to her letters. Does this mean her carefully prepared missives had been in vain? Did she receive replies and having won the battle, bin them? Knowing her, I somewhat doubt it – she wasn’t one to give up easily. One thing I can feel sure of is that whatever feedback she got, it definitely would not have been abusive.
Interesting, Barbara.
We seem to have had reason to send a lot of emails to complain about goods and services! With varying success…
The trolling of high profile women who express opinions is horrifying as you say. Such murkiness indeed.
As always an entertaining blog.
Thanks Joyce!
Dame B