LEGO

April 26, 2012

Dear Charmaine (AKA, LEGO Canada representative),

I must say that you did take your sweet time in getting back to me regarding the contract position for Marketing Coordinator with LEGO Canada. Exactly 78 days passed between the time that I applied for the position and when you contacted me regarding the status of my application. Also it seems extremely impersonal to send me an e-mail message asking me to open a PDF message attachment, just to tell me that I have an interview with you. Said attachment isn’t even a ‘message’ it’s a standardized, “You have an interview, human.” form with my name and contact information auto-filled. Could you not simply have told me this within your e-mail? Here’s a situation that may bring you to light:

-----

Imagine you are relaxing on a cruise, which is on a tour of the South American coast line. The wind is softly blowing through your hair and you sigh as you take a sip out of the Appletini that was just placed beside you with a, “Here you are, Madame.” Gazing over the vast blue landscape of ocean and sky, you wonder where the waters stop and the heavens begin when suddenly you are blinded by a bright flickering light. You raise your sunglasses and as you sit up to take a closer look, you realize that you were momentarily blinded by the reflection of a bottle, which is bobbing up and down amongst the calm ocean currents.

“Ahoy, Mateys! There be a bo’tle floatsing in dat water stuffs!” you call out (yes, you have bad grammar in this metaphorical leading-to-my-point story).

Quickly the Mateys hoist up the bottle out of the ocean. Excitement fills you as they bring the bottle onboard. You grab the bottle and examine it further.

“Ai! There be a note in dis ting!” you exclaim!

Pulling the cork off the bottle and emptying its contents into your hand, you unravel the note, but to your surprise the note is wrapping yet another bottle. Examining this tinier bottle, you realize that there is yet indeed another note within this bottle too! Pulling the cork off this bottle, you take out the final bottled note which reads,

Please help! Stranded! Google Map Coordinates: 43.8600138, -79.3843134

 You pause for a second before stating, “Why da erf did someone put dis message inside a bottle inside a note inside anusher bottle!?”

You crumple the note and toss it overboard.

-----

See, wasn’t that ridiculous? That’s how impersonal it feels when you’re sent a message within a standard form within an attachment within an e-mail, 78 days later. 78 days is the length of gestation for aardvarks. I could have had three to seven aardvark babies by now if I knew it would take this long! Not to mention that I called and left a message on your voicemail and a follow-up email to you not long after I applied, since your US counterpart suggested I contact you regarding job status (yes, that’s right, LEGO US suggested you were the best person to get in touch with regarding the position. I guess what they really meant was if I didn’t want to get in touch with anybody, I should contact you).

Overall, I was so upset that it took you this long to get back to me that I moved to a different city and changed my phone number so that you wouldn’t be able to call me to offer any type of interview. I half expect the interview (which, if you haven’t guessed by now, I am declining) to be with Microsoft Sam and not any actual human. I imagine it to have gone somewhat like this:

“Greetings human, Terry. Why do you want to work at LEGO?

“Well, I’ve been the biggest fan of LEGO my whole life...”

“12 second response time limit exceeded, answer nullified. Question 2: List 1 strength and 37 weaknesses.”

“I’m a great people person...”

“Incorrect response, people skills are not necessary. Interview terminated. *click*”

Now, you may think that I’m exaggerating just a wee bit. I mean you must have gotten at least 12 applications for this position, of which you probably responded to 10 of. Given this huge influx, it only seems necessary to streamline your hiring process, right? Nope. According to your hiring site,

“One of the first things you’ll notice about us is that we interact in a straightforward way built around honesty, trust and the fact that we truly care about every single individual within the LEGO Group.”

So far my experience has been that LEGO will not respond to any inquiries and when they do, it will be in roundabout, unnecessary ways in the most impersonal approach possible. Seems a bit odd to come off that way to the people you are potentially hiring, who you will spend more time with than your family, and who will be the future of your company.

In closing, please know that I spent more than 12 seconds in creating an automated response to you, Charmaine, and instead put a lot of work into writing this and making it personal. Still feel free to call me for an interview though. However I have seriously changed my number and I have absolutely no idea who you will be talking to. But, perhaps you will find the perfect candidate in the random person you speak with. I wish them luck.

Sincerely,

Terry Ibele

P.S. I’ve been the hugest LEGO fan my entire life. My childhood literally revolved around LEGO. I was subscribed to the LEGO Maniac magazine, sent in pictures of my creations, probably had the biggest LEGO collection you’ve ever seen and also made Legomations using my grandpa’s old camera. I still check in every now and then to see what new things LEGO is doing. I am thoroughly disappointed that my dream company comes across as extremely lame to people interested in working there. I expected everything to be fun and creative and entertaining and colourful and amazing! Instead, I died a little on the inside.

-------------------------------------

May 23, 2012

Dear Terry.

Thank you again for your interest in the position of Marketing Coordinator – Contract Assignment
thru January 31, 2013.

Even though we find your experience and competencies interesting, we have found a selection of
candidates, who better fulfill our required profile and unfortunately you are not one of them.

We would like to keep your data and information in our candidate database for possible future
use. Contact us if you are not interested in this.

The LEGO Group wishes you all the best for the future.

Yours sincerely,

Charmaine Collins
Recruitment & Emp. Relations Specialist
-------------------------------------
CONCLUSION: So, their response was in the form of a standardized form within an attachment within an e-mail, AGAIN! Lego - run by computer systems.

MCCAIN FOODS

April 21, 2012

Dear McCain Foods Canada

I regret to advise you that I cannot accept your offer to refuse to hire me at this time. Consequently, due to the terms under my unnacceptance, I will be required to accept a salary of $75,000 with full benefits and two weeks paid vacation.  

Although it was in both our best interests for me to be unable to take this job, I do regret that I am being controlled by circumstances that I am not able to currently control, which I understand is not ideal.

Please do not get me wrong. I am not at all looking forward to eating McCain’s crispy, mouth-watering, thin crust pizzas, fries, or brownie bites. The thought of being able to enjoy all of those items, made available free of charge to company employees makes my refusal to unnaccept all the harder. In fact it nearly repulses me. I would much rather go on eating my food free from free of charge.

Please be aware that I will be reporting for work first thing on Monday morning. Please also have security notified of my presence so that they will be able to escort me to my office without trouble.

Regards,

Your new employee,

Terry Ibele.

------------------------------------------

April 17, 2012

Dear Terry,

Thank you for your application for the position of Assistant Brand Manager. We regret to advise that we have decided to pursue other candidates whose qualifications and/or experience better fit the requirements of the position at this time.

We would like to thank you for the interest you have shown in our Company and the time and effort taken in applying for a position with us. We would also like to recommend that you continue visiting our career site to learn about future openings.

Sincerely,

McCain Human Resources

McCain Foods Canada

-----------------------

CONCLUSION: I am not at all happy about having to accept this job either.

WALMART

April 2nd, 2012

Dear Walmart,

Yesterday, I was at a Walmart SuperCentre (the one on Dufferin in Toronto, ON) and I bought some groceries.

While I was generally pleased with your pricing and selection, today I discovered something that I am not generally pleased with. In fact, I am downright unpleased. So unpleased that you may suspect that I am upset. Let me unpleasantly tell you why.

Milliseconds before biting into a succulent piece of your Black Forest Bar Cake (UPC 681131465359), I noticed that the expiry date on the package of said selected product was for April 12^th. Thinking to myself, “It is not nearly close to April 12, this product will be fresh and delicious,” I closed my lips around the blackness of the cake of forests bars and enjoyed its moist textures, sugary icing and hint of hydrogenated soya oil and carboxymethyl cellulose (as listed on the ingredients of the packaging).

Mmmmm, mmmm! Your black forest bar cake factories had added just the right amount of propylene glycol and sorbate sodium benzoate to make my taste buds tingle. As I leaned back against my chair, moving my jaw up and down repetitively in what can only be described as a chewing motion, I thoroughly enjoyed the perfect combination of all of the right ingredients, which your forest cake bakeries had mixed together in what can only be described as a black forest bar cake.

BAM! Suddenly my world was turned upside down and then right side up, and then upside down again as I was hurled into a summersault onto the floor! The sudden interruption of my jaw movements came about by some foreign ingredient that was not listed under the ingredients on the cake’s packaging. I spat the object onto the floor.

At a close glimpse, the object was blackish and very hard. It was in the approximate shape of a triangle and about the size of medium object. Not bigger than a big object, yet not smaller than a small object, it was indeed very medium. Quickly I checked the ingredients on the label to see if I had been a fool for buying a cake with a “hard, black, triangular medium object” in it. However, after reading and rereading the ingredients, I could not find the ingredient called, “hard, black, triangular, medium object”. Somehow, through your most amazing production facilities, this foreign object found its way into the exact cake that I bought from the exact location that I bought it from, in the second that I bought it. The highly improbable chances of all of these events coinciding would seem to be 0%. However, since this did happen, the chances of it happening have proven to be 100%. This leads me to believe that since the chances of me buying a cake from Walmart and finding foreign objects in it with which I can break my teeth on have been 100% in the past, they will continue to be 100% in the future.

Overall, I am not very pleased about the whole situation. I am pleased about how delicious the cake was, but the un-pleasure of the foreign object has made the whole experience an unpleasant one. I tried calling your 1-800-328-0402 customer service number, but your office was closed during the period of time that this happened to me, so I am sending you this letter instead.

Here is what I expect from you:

1.) Change your hours of operations to include times when people suddenly bite into things that are not supposed to be there from the products of which you sell.

2.) Either write, “may contain foreign objects that are not food” on your food labels, or don’t include foreign objects in your food.

3.) Call me back after 5:15 on a weekday or anytime on a weekend (or write me I guess, but it better be an EXTREMELY personalized letter and not a standard form) and offer some sort of reassurance on your product standards, because now I am afraid to buy any other Walmart branded food items.

If you would like the foreign object that I found in my food, I can mail it to you, but you better pay for postage and any foreign fees that customs will require.

Sincerely,

Terry Ibele

------------------------

CONCLUSION: They got back to me the next day. The Manager of the store called me and offered me a free cake and a $20 gift card, which I used to buy soil, a pot and beet seeds. I am now growing beets on my balcony. Thank you Walmart! You win!

PC THIN BAGELS

April 1st, 2012

Dear the Choices of your President’s Choice,

This letter of complaint is rather old, but it seems that I had forgotten to send it to you and you are still deserving of it, seeming as you have kept your terrible PC (Pretty Crappy) Thin Bagels available for the general public to choke and die on, AKA available for sale.

Now, let me tell you a story. Once upon a year and fourteen days ago, a young, mostly innocent fellow with a bright face and the spirit of a not-yet-depressed person was watching television. We’ll call this young fellow, “Terry”. Coincidentally, my name is also Terry. It would also be a coincidence if your name was Terry too, Terry. If not, reread that last two sentences replacing “Terry” with your actual name and be of the realization of all the coincidences that are happening!

So, Terry was watching television, and it was Commercial Time! You know, the part of the TV that tells young Terry how to spend his Terrytime.   

All of a sudden, a special commercial came on. This special commercial showed President's Choice’s Present, Galen Weston, conducting an in-store consumer test on how amazing PC Thin Bagels are. The commercial showed how surprised people were with how easily the bagels pulled apart, toasted to perfection, and tasted absolutely scrumptious! Terry thought to myself, I mean himself, how could real consumers, in a real commercial, in a real grocery store, with the real Galen Weston be wrong? Terry even checked President’s Choice’s website, where it indicated that 100% of PC Thin Bagel consumers "would buy again". Assuming that this was referring to buying PC Thin Bagels again and not funeral plots, which people generally "wouldn't buy again", Terry decided to buy a bag of bag-els.

Little Terry, with new bagel hope and a fistful of money ran his way to the nearest grocery store, which was through the woods and past grandma’s house. There, he immediately found the PC Thin Bagels stacked sky high in the discounted, expired products bin. Terry found this strange, because it seemed to indicate that nobody wanted to buy the bagels. However, the commercial people couldn’t be wrong, mayhaps the real-life people were not fully aware of PC Thin Bagels yet and were still buying normal bagels, or possibly porridge. Porridge seems to be a number one seller in let-me-tell-you-a-story land. Not to be dismayed, Terry grabbed a bag of cinnamon raison PC Thin Bagels and after wishing the Grocer the best day that this earth has ever bestowed on any single individual, he was off.

On the way home, Terry tripped on a rock and fell into the abyss and died. The End.

Just kidding, Terry went on to take the bagels home in order to consume them. Below are excerpts from Little Terry’s personal diary in his experiences with PC Thin Bagels:

Day 1, Bagel 1:

Dearest Diary,

The first bagel was stuck together, I had to cut it in half; it was so thin that it was very hard to cut. The bagel burned in the toaster due to it being sooooooooooo thin. I didn’t realize that my normal bagel settings would instantly incinerate paper thin bagels. Because of the incineration, the bagel tasted much like the charcoaled caterpillar that I thought it would be fun to eat at a campfire when I was six.

I was disparaged, but tomorrow is a new bagel-day that will happen (past, present and future tense all in one grammatically inconsistent sentence? CORRECT!). I hope I learned my bagelly lessons, tomorrow’s bagel will be perfect.

Day 2, Bagel 2:

Dearest Diary,

The bagel ripped apart easily! (YESS! (bracket within a bracket says, “2 S’s means extra ‘yes!’”)). However one half of the bagel was RIDICULOUSLY thin, thinner than corrugated cardboard, while the other half was a normal sized thin bagel, the approximate thinness of corrugated bagelboard.

I readjusted my toaster settings from “bagel” to “whispely steamed cracker,” because of my previous bagel burning experience. This time, bagel half one burned in the toaster because it was RIDICULOUSLY thin. Bagel half two did fine.

The bagel still tasted gross. This time it was like eating a mixture of charcoaled caterpillar and a recently deceased and still plumply fleshy, not-yet-charcoaled caterpillar sandwich. You know, because this time only half the bagel was burned.

Ok, ok, I'm still getting used to this. Weston hasn’t come out with any recent commercials with him being any less of a nice guy who just randomly gives food to children, which clearly are not his own (seriously, Weston, how many commercials are you randomly in other people’s houses with their kids while their parents are nowhere to be seen? Do you babysit?). So, Weston is still a nice guy and the commercial people still love the product. I'll try again.

Day 3, Bagel 3:

Dearest Diary,

The bagel ripped apart easily, again with a RIDICULOUSLY thin half.

This time the bagel did not burn. You know why? Because I had taken a course in “Thin Bagel Toasting” since it is not common knowledge that these bagels suck at toasting. Because of my recently gained astuteness in bagel toasting abilities, I toasted normally thin half and RIDICULOUSLY thin half each at separate toaster settings and was able to perfect the perfect thin bagel toastiness with perfect perfection.

This time as I bit into my metaphorically un-charcoaled caterpillars, which were slathered with creamy cheese, I was able to taste and experience and bask and soak and lie in the field of what PC Thin Bagels actually taste like. PAH! It was gross. It was lumpy. It was dry. The raisons were all hard. It was not unlike cardboard bagelboard, charcoaled caterpillars with hard raisons. It was gross.

I'm done with these bagels.

Day 4: Bagels 4-8:

Dearest Diary,

I gave the rest of the bagels to my mom. She will eat any bread-related product with content.

And so ends the excerpts from Little Terry’s diary. Little Terry grew up to become a very sad person with a very sadly depressive personal personality, all because the bagels which were portrayed as great turned out not to be. And he never trusted any commercial again until he died.

The End.

Overall, you bluffed calling wolf on me with PC Thin Bagels. Just like that story where the little kid calls wolf all the time and there are sheep and bagels and Galen babysits little kids. You’ve tarnished the PC Brand for me and now I am less willing to purchase new PC products, especially products that are advertised as being great. Perhaps you should advertise your products as less great, such as,

“Hey guys, Weston here. As I’m walking through someone else’s kitchen while their kids sit at the table, I just wanted to inform you that we made some thin bread things. They’re kinda lumpy and don’t pull apart right, but if you’re mostly content with digesting bread-related products, then you can buy them I guess. They’ll be on sale or something this week.”

If you advertised more like that, then I would be more inclined to buy more of your products. That doesn’t actually make sense, but neither does promoting disgusting products as great. I hope that it makes you digestibly content to realize that your 100% consumer satisfaction rating has dropped by about 1 person. Taking into consideration run-on sentences and all the discounted and unsold bread-related bagel-products of yours at my local grocery story that nobody bought, and that I’m probably the only one that you persuaded to buy your cardbread things, you now have a consumer satisfaction rating of 0%.

I hope you learned your lesson!

Sincerely,

Terry

P.S. You also changed the recipe of your spring rolls and I don’t like them anymore; don’t make me write another letter. However, your White Cheddar Deluxe Macaroni and Cheese Dinner is still and always has been amazing. Thanks for that I guess.

 -----------------------
April 2nd, 2012

Dear Mr. Terry,

Thank you for taking the time to write to us.

I’m so sorry to learn of your disappointment in President’s Choice Cinnamon Raisin Thin Bagels, but sincerely appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback with me.. Our product development team re-evaluates products on an ongoing basis and customer feedback such as yours is very valuable to them during that process. Accordingly, I have communicated your comments to them for consideration during their next review of this product.

Mr. Terry, we always want you to be confident in any control brand product you purchase.  That's why we are happy to offer a satisfaction guarantee for PC products.  If you are not happy with one of our products for any reason, we simply ask that you return the packaging and the receipt to your local store for a refund or exchange. If no receipt is available, simply return the packaging and an exchange of equal value will be granted. Please note that all items purchased from any No Frills store must be returned within 14 days of purchase accompanied by the receipt.

Please continue to share your feedback with us as it is one of the best ways for us to improve.

Sincerely,

Maha 

------------------------

CONCLUSION: Surprisingly, I'm pretty satisfied with this copy-paste response.

DAIRY QUEEN

April 1st, 2012

Dear Dairy Queen,

I absolutely hate the Dairy Queen Guy.

Sincerely,

Terry Ibele

--------------------
 CONCLUSION: I hate the DQG.