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  • 2000-12-09 (xsd:date)
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  • The Bedbug Letter (en)
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  • The tale of the bedbug letter, in which a complaining business customer receives a seemingly personalized and polite written apology in response to his correspondence — marred by the inadvertent inclusion of crude instructions from a manager to send the recipient the standard SOB letter — has been a part of contemporary lore since at least the 1920s, as these examples document: Its age notwithstanding, the tale continues to update itself, with overnight travel by Pullman car replaced by long distance journeys by airplane, and paperclipped instructions upgraded to Post-It notes: Variations: Did a real event spark off this legend? Possibly. Folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand reported on a 1992 letter from the corresponding secretary of the George Mortimer Pullman Encomium Society in which it was claimed the bed bugging took place on March 4, 1889, to a Mr. Phineas P. Jenkins, a salesman of pig-iron products. After spending a night in the company of far too many bedbugs (which in my book would number one), Jenkins penned a note of complaint to George M. Pullman, President of the Pullman Palace Car Company. In return, Jenkins supposedly received a wonderfully detailed and heartfelt apology from Pullman. Its effect was undermined, however, by the enclosure of his original letter, across which Pullman had handwritten Sarah — Send this S! O! B! the 'bedbug letter.' An interesting related incident was recorded as a news story in November 2000: Ian Payne wrote the BBC to request a season of Jean Simmons films and the autograph of Lorraine Heggessey. He received back a short letter saying the BBC could not consider a Simmons season at this time, and attached to the letter was a Post-It note reading: Nutter, polite fob off — no autograph. Whether the BBC actually sent Mr. Payne a letter with the described Post-It note attached (or whether the incident was contrived by the recipient or someone else in a case of pseudo-ostension) was never settled, as the BBC maintained it was unable to identify a possible culprit: We have apologised unreservedly to Mr. Payne. We have tried to find out who wrote the post it note and we have compared the handwriting from the officers and we cannot find anybody's handwriting who matches it. We are mystified at this. Another similar incident took place in September 2013, when a Seattle woman named Erin Boudreau e-mailed customer support at Postmates to complain about a service issue. Ms. Boudreau said she received a response (which she posted on Twitter) that included crudely-phrased instructions from Postmates CEO Bastian Lehmann about how her complaint should be handled: (Twitter screenshot) Mr. Lehmann subsequently posted an apologetic blog entry in which he referred to his message as a bad joke: Though this is not quite the bedbug story (a recurrent condition was not being passed off as a one-time occurrence), the element of a customer's written communication being responded to with a polite letter marred by the inclusion of a send this gal a fob off note (thus revealing the real sentiments behind the response) is close to it. In July 2014 a redditor posted an image of apology letter sent by United Airlines in response to a complaint, showing that the letter was a template and the sender had neglected to customize the appropriate fields: Braude, Jacob M. Complete Speaker's and Toastmaster's Library: Business and Professional Pointmakers. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965 (p. 282). Petras, Ross and Kathryn. The 176 Stupidest Things Ever Done. New York: Doubleday, 1996. ISBN 0-385-48341-4 (p. 150). The Big Book of Urban Legends. New York: Paradox Press, 1994. ISBN 1-56389-165-4 (p. 177). (en)
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