Shambles,

do you know these form letters you usually get when you have made a very specific complaint about a product or about an action of the government?

Dear customer, we are glad you have bought...we always try do our best to satisfy the needs of our customers...we are very sorry that you didn't find our product to meet your expectations (so far, not a single sentence had anything to do with your specific complaint)... we do not understand how the ...function did not operate the way it should when it is switched on following exactly the specifications in the manual. Are you sure you have...

You must know those letters that are full of words that are (mostly) completely irrelevant to the very specific complaint or (very few of them) only remotely related to your letter and do never actually respond to the specific point.

I do not know how your feelings are when reading such a letter but I feel that I am not taken serious at all. I tend to think that the other person has not even bothered to actually read or understand my letter and only reacts to some trigger words ("not happy" requires a sentence including the word "sorry" but without any admission of responsibility). Then some preformatted sentences (see above) are compiled to an (at the surface) extremely polite letter which does not address my question or my complaint.

It is a parody of real communication and I sometimes get so angry that I write a really nasty letter (including some not nice words) back just to see (invariably) that they still manage to be extremely polite without giving anything resembling a response one does expect from a human communicator (contrary to a dumb computer).

I hate these letters and I think most people hate them as well. But I wonder why you insist on writing such posts that never (or rarely) respond to specific questions or complaints. Your posts very often mimic such form letters and are a parody of any real communication.

I agree that you have a heavy work load here being forced to add at least one new thread daily, to repeat all editorial remarks in normal posts as a service to the readers, and to refresh all insults ever made to you once a month lest we might forget them. I also acknowledge that the wish to express simple things in a more elaborate language puts extra demands on your time.

But could you please check before posting whether the preformatted text fragments you use (that's what I hope for you; you wouldn't be so stupid to type the eight words you use to replace the three letters J,O,E each time anew, would you?) to compile a post fit the points they claim to respond to?

If you don't spend that extra effort your posts give the impression of computerised responses that never address the points made. They may even look like a refusal of communication.

Do you remember the Dubliners exchange? I did write that one of your statements was factually in error and how you could proceed if you wanted to contribute to the Dubliners discussion. The adult human way of responding would have been at least to acknowledge the error of fact and to post a thank you for the recommendations how to go on with that discussion.

Or take for instance your preformatted word processor fragment that you seem to like so much, namely that some poster only posts to pass judgement about a fellow poster. Could you at least check whether for instance the word "only" is correct in the specific context. Or, though I admit that is much more difficult to discern, whether judgement is passed about a person (as expressed in a word like "asshole" or passed about one idea proposed by the person. I've seen you using that preformatted word processor fragment in situations in which the judgement you refer to was only a small part of the post or there was no judgement at all of you but only judgement of one statement made by you.

In such situations, posting the usual fragment including the word "only" gives the impression that you have not read or understood what you claim to be responding to. One could even get the impression that you are as much interested in a real conversation as the person compiling the form letter I have used as an example of false conversation at the beginning of my post.

I'm sure you do not lie when posting something which is obviously not true, I'm also sure that I can be sure you are not unable to understand what you read or, that's a bit more difficult I admit, to understand what you write. It is surely only some minor slip or omission which makes your post look like being not an honest attempt at real communication. If you'd give your posts in addition to your heavy workload that extra bit of effort of proofreading, they might look a bit less like those form letters that as we know only aim at ending the communication in a superficially polite way without addressing the issues.

Wolfgang