John Linton
.......but it would be good if you could.
We have now been in the UK for five days and I feel very relaxed and actually, for the first time I can remember for a very long time, have actually slept through the past two nights which has become a rare occurrence. It is obviously good to get away from the daily demands of being a part of running Exetel and do useful things like spending a few hours at an Owl sanctuary talking to the falconer in the depths of rural Cornwall and just leisurely moving from place to place as the mood takes you without doing any sort of planning. This blissful feeling lasts most of the day with the only exception being when you finally plug your notebook in over the first Scotch of the day, usually in some beautiful hotel lounge overlooking something that is usually appealing and more often than not - quite beautiful. A nice person brings you a crystal glass with a generous measure of your selection of the day and a small jug of water and all is right with the world....
...until you look at your email.....
...and then you are jerked back to the reality of being part of a business where an infinitely tiny minority of your residential customer base can make 200 years of distilling experience produce something that tastes like battery acid. I don't ever want to change the fact that any Exetel customer can contact Exetel's directors if they genuinely believe that the rest of the Exetel personnel have failed to resolve some problem or other they are experiencing with their service. However I am sorely tempted to revise that attitude based on two emails I received today.
When I was part of creating Exetel and a part of setting the objectives for the new company I never expected to to have to deal with people who were so, hard to find the right word so I'll settle on, just plain horrible to have to deal with and for whom I, personally, felt so unwilling to lift a finger for. However, I'll just add that to being one more thing I completely mis-guessed along with the other zillion disappointments I've encountered along the way. Over the past 5 plus years I've responded to, literally, thousands of emails from customers on every topic anyone could ever think of that even vaguely relates to a business association between two parties. Overwhelmingly I've seen this task as both the duty of a small business manager and in most cases as a highly beneficial interlocution.
But not today. One email was from the functionally illiterate product of the Australian High School drop out system who not only can't spell or construct a meaningful sentence but uses some sort of horrible word (often misspelled) every five or six words or so.This particular person was upset that his service was being terminated because he had racked up 17 copyright infringement notices in 4 weeks as part of his service usage and, with the best will in the world, it was impossible to believe that all of those allegations were errors. He had also abused two different Exetel personnel in the same language he addressed to me which is a major 'no no' in any conduct of any support operation.
I deleted his email.
Unfortunately a similarly inappropriate to anyone's state of well being missive appeared five emails later. This one was from someone who took more than 9 paragraphs to describe just how grotesquely awful every aspect of Exetel was and then another five paragraphs of advice on how Exetel should re-organise itself to meet the basic needs of undemanding customers such as the writer. His service had also been terminated because of his abuse of Exetel personnel. I also deleted that email without replying.
I ordered another Scotch and thought about what was so different about providing Internet services that people thought it was appropriate to waste their time, as these two people had done in their totally different ways, rather than simply transferring their service to another provider (both were out of contract so no 'penalty' would apply) and both had been Exetel users for well over two years so whatever their current problem may have been it clearly wasn't something that had occurred before in their experience with Exetel. Clearly both had taken great umbrage at Exetel for canceling the business relationship but why is it such a big deal? If it had been a lawn moving service or car washing service they were that unhappy about they would simply have used another service
without having to abuse the directors of the company that provided it.
I have come to the conclusion that, in both those cases, it was the easy availability of email that allows people to write so inappropriately where on a 'face to face' basis they would NEVER dare use the approaches and languages such communications often take.
I'm less of a 'fan' of email right now than I was before today.