Bitchy McBitcherson's Blog

Tag: Open Letter

  • Open Letter: Homophone Edition

    Dear Deer,

    The truth is that I like you. I do. When my daughter claimed on the week that we moved here that she saw some of your type running around the neighborhood, I did not doubt her. She has her shortcomings but taxonomy is usually not one of them. However, as long months passed and I saw no sign of you, I did somewhat wonder about her sighting.

    Tonight when you suddenly appeared while I was out on my dog walk, I was a little startled. I am not sure why I would be. Having deer suddenly wandering across the path that runs along our backyard and through our neighborhood while I am walking 70 pounds of muscle, prey drive, and energy on a leash held by a sore hand, attached to a sore arm, attached to a sore shoulder, chest, back, and neck is really the exact sort of “Fuck You” I should expect from the universe at this point.

    So, my dear deer, when I say please go the fuck away, try not to take it too personally. Also, come back in about two weeks.

    Thanks,
    -Me

  • Open Letter: Neighbor Edition

    Dear Neighbors,

    Hi. I’m sure you’ve noticed that we’ve moved into your neighborhood. For one thing there was the whole giant moving truck thing. For another a couple of you come and stare out your windows at us whenever we are doing something in the front yard. For another thing, we clear our driveway and the sidewalk when it snows.

    The last time it snowed, it snowed only lightly, but we still cleared it. I’m sure that made some of you talk. Crazy people clearing now when there is so little of it. I notice that only one other person on the street bothered to clear theirs.

    The thing is? I’m from California and I don’t fucking like snow on the driveway, not even a thin layer. It stays there and then it freezes to a hard slippery layer, and then everything that we need to do on our driveway is more difficult to do safely, like walking, or driving.

    So, when your kids come and get into snowball fight in THIS front yard? And cause a bunch of snow to get in the driveway as they throw shit and make snow balls out of the snow piles we’ve carefully cleared from the driveway? It pisses me right the fuck off.

    And yes, it is important that the driveway be cleared off with the noisy shovels after 10 PM at night, because I don’t want to get up early in the morning to do it, and I don’t care if you don’t like the noise, and go ahead and keep staring at me out your window.

    I don’t want kids playing in the yard. I don’t want to be your friend. What I want is a moat and a 20 foot wall, but this is a rental.

    – Cranky, Un-neighborly, Unfriendly Me

  • Open Letter: Moving Company Edition

    Dear Moving Company Contact,

    Please refrain from replying to my email with a phone call. No, I will not call you back. If I had wanted to call you, I would have done that to start with.

    I already spoke to you on the phone once. I called you back in response to your first message, despite the fact you had not provided me with your extension, or last name, thereby making returning the message an even larger chore than it needed to be.

    I then, not only answered the questions about the delivery date, I explained exactly WHY it needed to be that date. Then I secured your email address and extension number, because it had not occurred to you to offer either.

    In my email I reiterated the date information to you. I typed out the date, month, year, and even the day of the week.

    I fail to understand why you are now leaving me a message saying that you got my email, and to please call you back and tell you which date I want for delivery (offering me 4 possible dates INCLUDING the one I have already told you both verbally and in writing is the only one that will work). We are clearly suffering from a communication failure, and since you are in a service business, perhaps you should work on your end a bit.

    Also, I believe it is standard upon leaving business messages to provide your phone number and extension, especially when you call from a blocked number. Yes, I did make note of your information from our previous conversation, but considering that you seem unable to hang onto important details yourself, you should probably assume the same about others and over-provide your contact information as a matter of course.

    (Not)Respectfully,

    – Me

    P.S. The woman you are replacing was a lot more functional and competent than you, and I sincerely hope that she quit for a position someplace with co-workers who are not as useless as you appear to be. I just wish she had done it AFTER I completed my move.

  • Open Letter: ALL CAPS EDITION

    Dear Everyone (but this week it is dedicated to real estate “professionals”),

    I really think that it would be best if you did not send out business emails in ALL CAPS.

    I think that this is true in general.

    When you are responding to an emailed inquiry from me, you even have a nice little clue that I feel this way. Look at the message I sent to you. If you bothered to pay attention you could notice that it is not in ALL CAPS. (it is also not in all lowercase with no punctuation at all whatsoever and i occasionally use spelchck and did not refer to anyone as “loozers” in my email)

    When you reply to me in ALL CAPS, it does not get me more excited about your property, nor does it raise my confidence in your abilities. It actually makes me want to come find you in person to break your keyboard over your head then hit you repeatedly with the broken pieces, and that is saying a lot, because I’d really rather do everything via the internet.

    Sincerely,

    Me

  • Open Letter: Stock & Option Solutions Edition

    Dear Stock & Option Solutions,

    I am in receipt of your letter, including information such as:

    We are writing to inform you that on Saturday, March 1, 2008, a business laptop computer was stolen from the possession of one of our employees while traveling. Specifically, the laptop contained personally identifiable information, including your name, Social Security number, address and data related to the administration of your stock purchase program.

    I’d like to take the time to ask you, “What the fuck?” and I mean that most sincerely.

    Why is this sort of information wandering around with an employee on travel AT ALL? In the unlikely case that you have a good reason for this data being on a laptop (which is mobile in nature and therefor less secure) in the first place, and the even less likely case that you have a good reason for the employee to be traveling with such a laptop, then still, “What the fuck?”

    Really.

    WHAT
    THE
    FUCK
    ?

    See, according to your own admission in the letter, this data was NOT ENCRYPTED.

    I am not impressed. I am not impressed by the fact this happened. I am not impressed that it took you so long to notify me. I am not impressed with anything about this. As a point of fact, I am actively pissed off.

    Your apology for “any inconvenience or concern that this incident may cause” me is officially not accepted.

    Are we clear?

    Disgustedly,
    -Me

  • Open Letter: Stop Helping Me Edition

    Dear Everyone and their Little Pony and especially Belkin and Linksys,

    I am so sick of all the “help” being offered to me in the form of crappy little specialty programs. All I want is a device driver. A driver that will tell my computer how to talk to your little piece of hardware. I do not need an interface with pretty colors and rounded corners and attractive buttons, that hides away all the “complicated” stuff and makes it so that it takes me 30 times longer than it should to make your specialty extra wonderful whiz bang wireless card work with MY network setup.

    The OS already has an interface to deal with wireless networking. Don’t disable it and make me use your bloated piece of shit instead, I do not care how many shades of blue you can use to decorate the UI.

    Fuck off.

    -Me

    Dear Microsoft Office Product Team,

    While you are busy imagining what new features I will never ever want out of Office suite, you might want to consider actually making it, I don’t know, IMPORT my settings from previous Office products when I “upgrade”. Word is essentially unusable out of the box for me. It is impressive that you have managed to turn one of your few functional products into a piece of shit with all those helpful features.

    If you really want to help, make sure the next version you release auto-composes and sends a hate letter from me to you or one of the other Microsoft groups at least once a month.

    Congratulations on making Office 2007 the upgrade to avoid of the decade. Enjoy your trophy.

    Thanks,

    -Me

    Dear Apple,

    The fact that a few people have chosen to place content that I really want to see in QuickTime format means that I do have QT installed on my computer and I do need updates on occasion. It in no way at all means that I ever ever EVER want you to install iTunes on my computer, so stop trying. It also does not mean that I want you to autosneak in the association of every fricken type of multimedia file with your program. The only thing I ever want to use QT for are the things I cannot access any other way. Fixing your helpful changes to my associations took up far more time than you are worth.

    Sincerely wishing you a crap day,

    -Me

  • Open Letter: CNN Edition

    Dear CNN,

    I began following <a href=”http://twitter.com/cnnbrk”>cnnbrk on twitter</a> with notifications on, because it seemed like a good way to find out about breaking news which might be of importance or interest to me.

    Admittedly things like some guy hitting a ball with a stick further, in the right direction, more times than some other guy hit a ball with a stick in a similar fashion, is of zero interest to me, but I am willing to consider that it is of interest to a large chunk of your other twitter followers.

    However, I think it is important to point out that Jenna Bush getting engaged IS NOT BREAKING NEWS. It isn’t. There are a handful of people for whom it is breaking news, and I doubt any of them are even on twitter, much less following cnnbreak.

    Do you know whose engagement I would actually care to be notified about RIGHT AWAY? No, you don’t, because it wouldn’t be anybody that CNN would know anything about.

    Do not feed the bridezillas.

    Thanks,

    Me