Wednesday, May 20, 2009

The Week Of Asking About Time Travel: Letter to Plimoth Plantation, Green Forest wants to give me free stuff, just not now

As I've mentioned before, there are many kinds of form letters. Some are, seemingly, written by a computerized monkey. Some feature a single, subtle, personalized sentence toward the very end that indicates a human might have read your letter. And then there are my favorite kinds of form letters: Those that throw in an entire personalized section for you, but do a lousy job of covering up the fact that the rest of the letter was written by a quality assurance person who retired over ten years ago. Consider this letter from Green Forest (yes, those font changes are theirs, not mine, and no, I did not mess with the grammar in any way):

Hello Kristen;


Firstly, thank you for your email, and kind words.


Everyone here would like you to know your support is sincerely appreciated.


Also, we do agree, and recognize that getting our products into the hands of first time consumers is important. Therefore, we hope to have coupons available to potential consumers in the future, and invite you to contact us at a later date to see if they are available.


Again, we thank you for contacting us, and we do apologize for not being able to accommodate your request at this time. However, if we can be of help to you in the future, please do not hesitate to contact us again.


Warmest regards,

PLANET INC.

Lottie Boettcher

Consumer Affairs


My favorite things about this letter:
1. They don't force themselves to make the difficult decision between a comma or a colon in their salutation, but allow themselves to compromise with the all-purpose, not-quite-right semi-colon.
2. They never say that their letter is in response to my inquiry to Green Forest toilet paper. Only through some investigation do I learn that PLANET INC. (not sure why the company name is all in caps) owns Green Forest.
3. The fact that they admit they have nothing to give me for free now, but that they might the next time I ask. Just like a girl on Wednesday night Luther League who's playing hard to get!
4. And, of course, I can't help but love their overt font changes.

Alrightee then. That put me in a good mood. I'm going to write to Plimoth Plantation now, and ask why they spell Plimoth with an "i" when everyone else spells it with a "y."

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