Holiday Greetings Gone Awry

The NC Park Service is in deep doo-doo. It seems they sent out a Christmas Greeting to some 47,000 people on their mailing list without disabling the “Reply to all” function. As a result, a platform was suddenly available for a number of off-topic comments to go to people who hadn’t signed up for them.

Understandably, there’s some irritation. In fact, there’s even quite a bit of outrage about the incident, despite the assurances that nobody’s personal information was distributed.

Of course, who knows? We get assurances from the government (and big business) all the time about things that are later proven to be blatantly false, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of accountability. I wouldn’t bet the farm that at least one person among those 47,000 recipients doesn’t have the technical ability to somehow decipher all of the individual email addresses.

Aside from the mistake of leaving “Reply to All” enabled, Park Director Lewis Ledford and Assistant Director Don Reuter miss the point. Reuter’s comment to the Charlotte Observer (12/30/2011) was, “We were wanting to wish people a pleasant time, and we caused some aggravation. That’s unfortunate.”

What both of these civil servants fail to realize is that most of us don’t want Christmas Greetings from the Park Service – or any other branch of the government. It’s better now that we’re not wasting postage and paper, but you are still stealing my time and energy by assaulting me with unwanted advertising.

And let’s acknowledge that this is what it is. I’m not friends with people who send this kind of “greeting” out. I have no personal relationship with the Parks Service, or with my local government, elected officials, the cable company, telephone company, electric company or gas company. Unless there’s a notice of some type of special offer or a coupon in that flyer that comes to my mailbox, it’s going directly into the recycling bin. Rather than thinking more of you for acknowledging the holiday I’m pissed that you’d waste money on this nonsense and then ask for a rate hike.

You want to wish me a Happy Holiday and be my friend? Answer the phone in less than 10 rings, and then let me get transferred through the phone bank without having to repeat my issue 6 times. Develop a scheduling system that lets me know when you’re coming other than “. . . sometime between 8:00 and noon on Tuesday.” Respond to emails that I send with an actual answer, not a canned response that tells me how valuable I am as a customer and that I’ll receive an individual answer within 24 hours – especially when more often than not those responses never come.

Companies – especially utilities and government agencies – seem to think that those of us who do business with them haven’t discovered that we are no longer important to them. Most of us recognize that we are merely the cattle that are driven through their stockyards, to be fattened before we go off to the plant and make them a profit. We are the raw materials consumed in the profit machines of these organizations, and we go either willingly or because we feel there is no alternative.

As consumers, most of us have accepted that the days of reasonable levels of customer service, individualized attention and generally giving a damn about whether we spend our money in their place of business or not is gone. The threat that, “I’ll take my business elsewhere” is meaningless, since there are millions of other consumers all going to the various branches of the big-box in question and the loss of even the largest customer to any particular branch is largely irrelevant.

It would seem that they could recognize that sending a Christmas Card isn’t going to rebuild that relationship.

Sending out 47,000 pieces of spam with the ability for every wack job on that particular mailing list to respond isn’t going to win you any friends, either. It might stimulate business, though, for the tar and feather industry.