Following on from the hilarious airline food rant, complete with pictures, sent to Virgin’s Sir Richard Branson, here are some other notable entries in the art that is the complaint letter.
This man clearly felt mere words could not express his horror
Plane passengers seem prone to depicting as well as explaining complaints. The pictures on this complaint letter of a man miffed – and that’s putting it mildly – to have been seated next to the lavatory makes it easy to sympathise with his flight plight.
Of course, a letter itself is not always sufficient – particularly if you want to stand out from the crowd and make your voice heard. Which, presumably, is why this man chose to send two “offerings” from his cat’s litter tray along with his complaint to telephone and internet provider NTL “as an expression of my utter and complete contempt for both you and your pointless company.”
Just in case the significance of the ‘gift’ was missed, he added: “I sincerely hope that they have not become desiccated during transit – they were satisfyingly moist at the time of posting, and I would feel considerable disappointment if you did not experience both their rich aroma and delicate texture. Consider them the very embodiment of my feelings towards NTL, and its worthless employees.”
This unhappy car owner berated Chrysler for the amount of problems he said his car had had, including such choice lines as “Its annoying to me that if you add the money I paid for the Neon to the money I’ve spent fixing extraordinary repairs to the lemon, I could have bought a top of the line Honda Accord. That’s what I would have liked in the first place, but I couldn’t afford it, and I thought buying American was the right thing to do. With a Honda, mechanics wouldn’t be laughing at me because they wouldn’t be seeing me. That would be nice.” and “I don’t want the car to explode while I’m in it. Frankly, I do want it to explode when no one is in the car or within 100 yards of it.”
But the real genius is in the final paragraph: “I look forward to your enthusiastic and prompt response. Since I didn’t get one last time from you ninnies, I’m also sending this letter to a few other people, just to see if they might care more. I’ve got nothing to lose and nothing better to do, since I don’t have a car to get out.”
Those cc’d include Martha Stewart, David Letterman, Al Gore, George W. Bush, Prince Charles of Windsor, Pamela Anderson Lee and Bill Gates. Unfortunately, there is no update on whether responses were received. Which is a shame.
Of course, acerbic, incisive and sarcastic letter-writing is not always confined to the complainant – here, an Inland Revenue customer relations employee responds to a complaint politely but with unexpected underlying dark humour. Our favourite line? “A couple of technical points arising from direct queries:
1. The reason we don’t simply write “Muggins” on the envelope has to do with the vagaries of the postal system;
2. You can rest assured that “sucking the very marrows of those with nothing else to give” has never been considered as a practice because even if the Personal Allowance didn’t render it irrelevant, the sheer medical logistics involved would make it financially unviable.”
This letter to David Miliband about how to make money from not rearing pigs briefly made the author the toast of the internet, while these excerpts of letters to councils were a great source of unintended amusement to the recipients.
And, finally, while not strictly a complaint letter, this man’s inventive attempt to pay his tax bill using a picture of a spider in place of actual funds certainly deserves an honourable mention.
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Full article and photo: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/4357553/Top-5-best-complaint-letters.html
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First letter:
Second letter: http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=8&threadID=172325&start=0
Third letter: http://www.flinksnorph.com/chrysler.html
Fourth letter: http://www.pprune.org/jet-blast/103834-good-god-inland-revenue-has-sense-humour.html
Fifth letter: http://www.order-order.com/2007/06/letter-to-miliband.html
Sixth letter:
