Rowan's blog

Russell King's Open letter to Conservatives (US)

I was left speechless after reading the recent Harris poll which revealed Republican attitudes about Obama.

Russell King, clearly, was not. Read his 'Open letter to Conservatives'. Brilliant!

One blog post gets more response than 24 returned letters

I'm very pleased to report that I have been contacted by some very nice people at Vodafone and the matter of the mail has been resolved.

It seems (in this instance anyway) that one blog post got more response than 24 returned letters.

Vodafone, are you listening?

Hi Vodafone.

Thanks for all the mail you continue to send to the previous owner of our house. Unfortunately I seem to be having as much trouble reaching you as you're having reaching them.

It started out ok. I would write a polite request on the Vodafone envelope asking for the letter to be returned to sender. Then I'd take a short detour while walking the dog to place it in the mail box.

A few months went by and my requests to return to sender became less polite. CAPITAL LETTERS and some exclamation marks started to appear, e.g. PLEASE REMOVE THIS ADDRESS FROM YOUR DATABASE!! Some months I would comment on my sadness and frustration that, (far more importantly than wasting their own money) they were wasting precious forests as they continued to use non-recycled paper on envelopes to people who they knew no longer lived at that address.

It has now been two years and I can no longer count how many polite, frustrated and recently downright rude return to sender requests I have written on those envelopes, or how many times the dog and I have taken the detour to the mail box.

Today I finally resorted to other methods of trying to get through to them. I spent five minutes writing a nice, neutrally worded piece of feedback on their site, only to find I had to enter my email address at the end to send it. Based on my experiences thus far, I'm not interested in giving them another address! So I tweeted about my problem. Vodafone has several Twitter ID's so hopefully they, (or someone at one of their agencies) also actually listens to/monitors Tweets containing their company name. Perhaps they also monitor mentions of 'Vodafone' on blogs?

Lets see what happens. I'll keep you posted (pardon the pun).