Dear Sirs,
I have been a loyal Blackberry customer for many years but I am afraid to inform you that my current handset will be my last. Since I got my Bold 8900 last June, I have put up with defunct ring tones, an alarm that only sounds nine times out of ten and jammed trackpads. This is actually my third model in a year and despite numerous vacuous promises from your customer support team, I still do not have a product fit for purpose.
Riddled with flaws, it is the most poorly thought-out thing since my first marriage. I pay through the arsehole for my contract with Orange and for the extortionate sum of money they diddle me out of I expect a handset that will at least reliably awaken me from my slumber every morning. Because Agatha, my good lady-wife, suffers from chronically blocked nasal passages, I am accustomed to sleeping with background noise not unlike a donkey being sawn in half. Subsequently, conventional alarm clocks do not cut the mustard and my Blackberry is the only thing loud enough to wake me up. This is patently no good if the alarm cannot be relied upon to go off every time. On numerous occasions I have missed very important events because of the poxy design of your product and it simply will not do. According to my calculations, it would have been cheaper and more effective had I imported a child from a Third World country a la Angelina Jolie, positioned it on my bedside table with an airhorn and instructed it to let rip at 6am every morning.
Depending on the stringency of international child-snatching rules, I will be investing in an HTC or iPhone when my contract is up in December.
Yours peevishly,
Derek Haselhurst-Horton
Tuesday, 19 July 2011
Friday, 15 July 2011
McCoys
McCoys have a campaign where they advertise their crisps as just for men. Their website features such pearls of wisdom as how not to cry and how to avoid catching man 'flu.
Dear Sirs,
Although my good lady-wife Agatha frowns upon unwholesome food like crisps, often I can persuade her to make an exception in the case of your delicious McCoys. The deep ridges of each delicious crisp intensify the flavourings and satisfy the most savage of cravings, and more importantly I have found your ‘crisps for men’ campaign to be most instructive. It has even helped me to overcome my issues about my sub-par masculinity. Although I am a proud member of the heterosexual community, from a very young age I have been ridiculed for my somewhat womanly features and higher-than-averagely pitched voice. Since my school-days I was the unfortunate recipient of all manner of unsavoury monikers including ‘cissy’, ‘pansy’ and ‘knob-gobbler’. Although my good lady-wife Agatha is a delicate flower at heart, she has always ‘worn the trousers’ in our relationship and I have always been privately intimidated by her ability to grow a more substantial moustache than I. Because she disapproves of your delectable potato products and I am not allowed to use the World Wide Web without supervision, I have had to slip Nytol in her morning Earl Grey in order to communicate my gratitude to you over e-mail. Even as I type this, she is slumped face-down on the kitchen table. I actually feel quite empowered and feel this is the sort of behaviour the staff at McCoy HQ would endorse. Before I read your manifesto of manliness I would never have had the courage to drug my own lady-wife, so thank you, sirs, I take my hat off to you!
Yours admiringly,
Derek Haselhurst-Horton
P-s. I must applaud, particularly, your guide to tackling a grizzly bear. Although I am a pacifist by nature and have never ventured anywhere more exotic than Great Yarmouth due to my fear of snakes, planes and foreign food, I am whole-heartedly looking forward to ‘smacking a bear between the eyes’. Bravo, sirs!
Dear Sirs,
Although my good lady-wife Agatha frowns upon unwholesome food like crisps, often I can persuade her to make an exception in the case of your delicious McCoys. The deep ridges of each delicious crisp intensify the flavourings and satisfy the most savage of cravings, and more importantly I have found your ‘crisps for men’ campaign to be most instructive. It has even helped me to overcome my issues about my sub-par masculinity. Although I am a proud member of the heterosexual community, from a very young age I have been ridiculed for my somewhat womanly features and higher-than-averagely pitched voice. Since my school-days I was the unfortunate recipient of all manner of unsavoury monikers including ‘cissy’, ‘pansy’ and ‘knob-gobbler’. Although my good lady-wife Agatha is a delicate flower at heart, she has always ‘worn the trousers’ in our relationship and I have always been privately intimidated by her ability to grow a more substantial moustache than I. Because she disapproves of your delectable potato products and I am not allowed to use the World Wide Web without supervision, I have had to slip Nytol in her morning Earl Grey in order to communicate my gratitude to you over e-mail. Even as I type this, she is slumped face-down on the kitchen table. I actually feel quite empowered and feel this is the sort of behaviour the staff at McCoy HQ would endorse. Before I read your manifesto of manliness I would never have had the courage to drug my own lady-wife, so thank you, sirs, I take my hat off to you!
Yours admiringly,
Derek Haselhurst-Horton
P-s. I must applaud, particularly, your guide to tackling a grizzly bear. Although I am a pacifist by nature and have never ventured anywhere more exotic than Great Yarmouth due to my fear of snakes, planes and foreign food, I am whole-heartedly looking forward to ‘smacking a bear between the eyes’. Bravo, sirs!
Thursday, 14 July 2011
Wagamama
Dear Sir/Madam,
I ate at one of your establishments in Spitalfields recently and for the most part the experience was a satisfactory one. The seating offered all the comfort one would expect from a wooden bench and the staff did their best to accommodate our party of eleven. I ordered the breaded chicken and sticky rice with curry sauce – and you need to sell that sauce in supermarkets, by the way, so I can bulk-buy and then bathe in it – and it was delicious. The only fly in the ointment was the apparatus I was expected to eat it with; chopsticks are not the implements of choice for most Western people. I cannot speak for the whole of Europe, but here in the UK we like to eat out with the sole intention of shovelling as much food into our face-holes as possible. It is impossible to do this with chopsticks, especially if you were saddled at birth with chubby sausage-like digits like yours truly. I very much understand you’re trying to replicate the experience of eating at a genuine Japanese noodle-bar, but when a customer requests a knife with which to eat their dinner, I think there should be some available. I was told by the waitress that there were no such implements for diners to use and that I’d have to soldier on with my set of chopsticks and a spoon. I’m sorry sirs, but a spoon quite literally does not cut it!
As it were, I struggled on with my meal – how I wished I had ordered the soup! – and subsequently spent about an hour ferrying my food to my mouth, four grains of rice at a time. I hope you take my suggestions on board and if you cannot provide knives to guests, at least warn them in advance to bring their own cutlery. Frankly, this refusal to acknowledge and accommodate Western eating habits shows an unwillingness to assimilate to British culture. I find this unacceptable.
Yours patriotically,
Derek Haselhurst-Horton
I ate at one of your establishments in Spitalfields recently and for the most part the experience was a satisfactory one. The seating offered all the comfort one would expect from a wooden bench and the staff did their best to accommodate our party of eleven. I ordered the breaded chicken and sticky rice with curry sauce – and you need to sell that sauce in supermarkets, by the way, so I can bulk-buy and then bathe in it – and it was delicious. The only fly in the ointment was the apparatus I was expected to eat it with; chopsticks are not the implements of choice for most Western people. I cannot speak for the whole of Europe, but here in the UK we like to eat out with the sole intention of shovelling as much food into our face-holes as possible. It is impossible to do this with chopsticks, especially if you were saddled at birth with chubby sausage-like digits like yours truly. I very much understand you’re trying to replicate the experience of eating at a genuine Japanese noodle-bar, but when a customer requests a knife with which to eat their dinner, I think there should be some available. I was told by the waitress that there were no such implements for diners to use and that I’d have to soldier on with my set of chopsticks and a spoon. I’m sorry sirs, but a spoon quite literally does not cut it!
As it were, I struggled on with my meal – how I wished I had ordered the soup! – and subsequently spent about an hour ferrying my food to my mouth, four grains of rice at a time. I hope you take my suggestions on board and if you cannot provide knives to guests, at least warn them in advance to bring their own cutlery. Frankly, this refusal to acknowledge and accommodate Western eating habits shows an unwillingness to assimilate to British culture. I find this unacceptable.
Yours patriotically,
Derek Haselhurst-Horton
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