A short (funny) guide to understand corporate letters.
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
As example I’ll use phrases from e-mails EXPEDIA sent to me when they tried to scam me: (Read my case at : http://www.victimsofexpedia.com/mycase.htm ). But you would find very familiar most of these phrases.
First at all EXPEDIA’s messages (or most corporate messages) are well written letters from superior people with a deep knowledge and understanding of grammar, semantic and dialectic. We customers are ignorant, retarded, with difficulties in understanding basic concepts of communication.
This is a short guide to understand what we customers believe EXPEDIA is telling us and what EXPEDIA is really telling us.
It took me while to appreciate the real meaning of the messages I had in my mailbox.
| What you think EXPEDIA tells you |
What EXPEDIA is telling you |
| Dear Customer |
Retarded customer; You idiot, |
| Thanks for contacting EXPEDIA |
Why are you bothering us? |
| Thanks for choosing EXPEDIA |
Thanks for giving us a chance to scam you |
| Your feedback is important to us |
Your money is important to us |
| We will contact you within 72 hr |
Don’t bother us for 72 hr, call us after 1-4 weeks when you don’t hear from us. Better, don’t call us again |
| Please allow 1-2 billing cycles for the credit to reflect to your statement |
Don’t expect your money back in less than 6 month. Better, forget about your money. |
| Sorry for the long delay in resolving your case |
We couldn’t find earlier an excuse to keep your money |
| I wish to apologize for the fact that you have not been contacted |
We need more time to find an excuse to scam you |
| We understand you have some issues with our services |
We know you don’t want to be scammed |
| As a sign of goodwill we’ll reimburse you 800 U$D for the 1229.99 U$D we charged in your credit card. |
We will steal 429.99 U$D from your credit card |
| We’ll offer you a coupon for 150 U$D for future purchases |
We want another chance to scam you |
| We regret this incident |
We regret we couldn’t scam you |
| We are sorry this issue was not resolved to your satisfaction |
We are sorry you don’t accept being scammed; we are sorry you figured out we were trying to scam you |
I’ll keep updating this page at: www.victimsofexpedia.com/jokes01.htm
