June 29, 2006 by Amy

Peeve

I have many, many pet peeves. I’m a rather impatient person (I know you all are flabbergasted to read that), and so I have very little patience with stupid people, people who cannot communicate, lazy people, mean people, people who lie, cheat or steal, etc. Shoot ’em all and be done with it, I always say.

In my job I have the unenviable task of receiving all the general inquiries that come in off our Web site. I must review each one and then determine the proper person to field the inquiry, sending it off to be handled.

I’ve seen all kinds of requests. Someone wrote in once at midnight, wanting to cancel her 8 a.m. appointment (we open at 8) and saying that she shouldn’t be charged the late cancellation fee because she was giving us notice. Yes, because we have someone here at the spa at midnight, monitoring e-mails to make sure we can field your request.

Sometimes I get folks writing in that they received a gift certificate 15 years ago and they lost it and just now found it and could we please still honor it even though it clearly says that it expired 14 years ago.

This afternoon, I received the type of message that just gets me all steamed. A woman who works at a local law firm sent this message (I’m not correcting typos or anything…just straight cutting and pasting so you get the full effect, but I am changing the color to red because I want to be clear that this is not something I wrote):

I’m wanting to know do you have something for a group of girl three are four……. Like some kind of package deal,,,, You would a spa party……

WTF? What is that? Do you want a spa party for a group of three or four girls, or girls who are three or four years old? Or, according to how she typed it, a group of one girl, singular. Three is not four, no matter how you slice it, and it’s not proper grammar to say “three are four” anyway. It should be three is four. Which is idiotic because, as I stated before, three is not, and can never be, four. And what exactly does “You would a spa party…….” mean, anyway?

Maybe I can hire one of the lawyers at her firm to sue her for wasting my time with her inane stupidity. That was her entire e-mail, as well. No salutation, no idea of timing, no way to contact her except to hit “reply,” which virtually guarantees a flurry of illiterate mumblings coming from her instead of a single telephone call to answer her questions and make arrangements if she so chooses.

I was a good marketing doobie, though, and forwarded her message on to the appropriate person, our events coordinator, for response.

But I really wanted to reply, “I’m sorry, but our spa is reserved entirely for those people who can actually communicate. Please feel free to try one of other spas in our community who won’t be annoyed by your illegible requests.”

It’s a fine, fine day in Aimville.