I got an email from EB Games Australia:
Dave Raftery, you’re awesome!
What prompted this ebullient outpouring of admiration? I pre-ordered a game. Based on that fact alone, the company judges that I’m awesome. I could torture animals in my spare time, or harass small children. I could be the sort of person who defaces currency, or I could even be a German political leader from the 1930’s. But because I’ve put down a deposit on a video game, all my past sins are forgiven. $30 buys absolution for the murder of millions, according to EB Games.
So I could be overreacting. Actually, one might say, they’re just saying this to make me feel better. Some consultant somewhere took $30,000 to tell them to treat their customers like big-boobed, big-dicked superstars (not all at the same time, that might alienate folk). They don’t really mean to issue a blanket statement, “You’re awesome!”
Except that’s what they said. If they didn’t mean it, why say it?
In response to my rant about Virgin Mobile Australia (a wholly owned subsidiary of Optus) I received this mention on Twitter from Virgin Mobile USA:
@djr we appreciate your feedback. If you would like assistance from Virgin Mobile, just send us a tweet. ^PL
Judging from this account’s stream, I assume the “^PL” a the end indicates which customer service rep responded to this. The implication being that an actual human wrote this, and not just a bot programmed to respond to any mention of Virgin Mobile. My issue is, if one were to actually read what I wrote they’d notice that I was talking about VM Australia, a completely unrelated company.
A quick instance of confusion is no bother. Your job is to scan Twitter for mentions of Virgin Mobile and manage them. Except that this person, no doubt thanks to some $60,000 consultant, has to say that they “appreciate” my feedback. They “appreciate” it so much that they clearly didn’t read it. They don’t appreciate it at all of course. It’s just that that word has been chosen as the most adept at placating whoever they’re talking to.
They don’t mean it. They’re just saying it. I could say horrible things about their family, and they’d claim to appreciate it. Because that’s their job, and words are just words. They don’t really mean anything.
(Aside: Not that I blame ^PL, or the poor code jockey who had to script the automailer to tell me how awesome I am. I hold them as responsible as I hold people working in call centers.)