Please accept my apologies…
Quill etc/Charles Stanhope/flickr
One of the lighter sides of sorting out all my late mother’s effects 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, ‘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, presumably, the error had been rectified by the manufacturer.
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. If we want to express dissatisfaction with a product I would have thought that there is no need to write to ‘The Managing Director’. I was, nevertheless, surprised to discover my search engine awash with examples of how to write an effective complaints letter, so clearly the art is not yet dead.
But this is 2014, and every organisation is represented throughout the social media network, so 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 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 stories of the troll threats to Mary Beard and Stella Creasy, to name just two, are truly horrifying and sickening. We certainly pay a high price for the 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? 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.