#email thread

L: Good afternoon! I hope this email finds you well. Myself and three other BA Art and Design students at BIAD are making a publication for along side our exhibition in January 2016. We came to Rope Press a year ago with Stuart Whipps for a brief introduction to your facilities and now we're hoping to book a tutorial or workshop with Rope Press, if this is possible? I look forward to hearing back from you. Best, Larissa.

RK: Hello Larissa, Thanks for the inquiry and great to hear about your project! Are you available on Thursday at 3pm to come to Rope Press ? Thanks, Reece.

L: Hello. Unfortunately we are all not available to make that time. Are you available at all next week, preferably Monday? Best, Larissa

RK: Hi Larissa, When on Monday would be best for you to visit? Thanks, Reece.

L: Hello, Is 2:30pm onwards on Monday okay? We're free until 4:30pm. Hope this is suitable for you. Many thanks, Larissa.

RK: Hi Larissa, Shall we say 3pm on Monday? Thanks, Reece.

L: Afternoon! 3pm would really be perfect. We're really grateful of the time you've made for us and we're looking forward to meeting you. See you then, Larissa.

Expectation:

Reality:

N: i guess this means he's listened to it

P: Haha!

N: he had nothing to say about it

P: What do you mean?

Dear Éponine,

It’s been awhile since we talked, so I thought I would write to say hello. How are you liking America so far? Have you finished settling in? Have your classes started yet?

Things are about the same here. Enjolras and Bahorel got arrested the other day for starting an impromptu riot, and Feuilly and I went to bail them out. I know you would have given them a stern talking to. Jehan misses his baking partner.

I don’t know if it’s appropriate to tell you, but I went on a date with Marius today. It was nice, but different. I’m still getting used to looking beside me and not seeing you there. I don’t regret our decision, but I still miss you.

FROM: Mae

TO: Mel

Hi Grumpo!

I don't know how to start this exactly but, this is not a real email! It's an email for our blog and it's about being ditzy.

I thought we should do a post about this because in my experience, you don't act ditzy, even as a joke. Whereas acting ditzy was my #1 favorite type of humor for a long time (and to some extent still is, although it's losing ground to Strange and Gross Comments). I started doing it pretty consciously--I thought of it as the more evolved alternative to jokes at other people's expense, which I told all through middle school because I sucked in middle school. 

I figured that if I was the butt of my own jokes, there was no chance of meanness. And if I  exaggerated my ditzy side--which is totally real, I totally like, fall over and get confused and call bananas "that one long food"--I felt like no one would think I was fishing for compliments. Acting ditzy/self-describing as ditzy has more of an "I don't take myself seriously" subtext, I think, than an "I feel genuinely bad about myself" one. 

There are some obvious downsides to a ditzy schtick, like people thinking you are dumb as shit, but I still think in some situations the pros outweigh the cons. At the same time, I think one of the great things about meeting you was that by hanging out with you, I picked up some ways to joke around that didn't convey arrogance or meanness OR ditziness. 

Which makes me especially curious about your thoughts on acting ditzy--do you actively avoid it? Have you tried it out? How do you react when you encounter ditzy-seeming people? Gooooooo timeeeeeee

<3

I don't use Tumblr, and I don't know how it works, but I wanted to put this up somewhere.

So, last week I went to Wawa and ordered a chicken sandwich with an assortment of toppings, as I do relatively frequently both on weekends and when studying. It really wasn't a big deal, but they put one chicken tender on my sandwich instead of the usual three. This, combined with the fact that I had been studying for 5 hours straight, led me to write a creative complaint to Wawa. Little did I know that they would answer me...

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I sent this to Wawa through their customer relations page:

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To Whom It May Concern:

Let me start by saying that I have been to each and every Wawa store across the United States as part of a lifelong journey. I started when I was sixteen, traveling from town to town on foot, stopping at each store and ordering the same chicken sandwich, and I made it to each and every one of your 590+ locations. I have to tell you, some of them are pretty well hidden. Tricky! But I found them using a police dog I stole from a K9 unit somewhere in northern Alabama. They fired a few rounds from an old Civil War-era rifle in my direction, but luckily I avoided the bullets like Samuel L. Jackson in that scene in Pulp Fiction, you know? Where he and John Travolta shoot up those guys in the apartment? Samuel L. Jackson ate that Big Kahuna burger, which made me really hungry when I was watching the movie.

Anyways, Jitters (that's what I named the dog) and I have been working our way up the east coast ever since then, just the two of us. Admittedly we haven't walked the entire way, but have slept a couple of nights in boxcars along major railroad lines, and one night we found ourselves sleeping inside the cabin of a truck with a surprisingly pedophiliac driver. 

Which brings me to tonight. At approximately 2:00am, I entered your store at 38th and Spruce in University City (Philadelphia), and expected to obtain said chicken sandwich. I wanted the satisfying crunch of wilted lettuce, the creamy artificial American cheese texture mixed with the freshness of non-spicy jalapenos and briny salt of canned pickles. I wanted to bask in the glory of six full inches of bread that had been baked unquestionably sometime within the past week. But most of all, I wanted the orgasmic dichotomy of taste and texture that is your fried baked chicken. Ever so fried on the outside, with just the perfectly debatable amount of crunchiness, I could not help but salivate whilst I waited for my number to be called. After seemingly a fortnight or more, and after cleaning up what saliva had dripped from betwixt my lips onto the floor, I picked up said sandwich and returned to my domicile where I had planned to devour the sandwich in a matter of seconds.

But as I unwrapped the glorious wonder that is a Wawa chicken sandwich, something felt wrong. I unconsciously shed a small tear, something I only realized once I felt the tear roll down my cheek. My world was out of order - what I was about to do could change my life as I knew it. But yet, with the courage of a thousand William Wallaces (the Mel Gibson character, not the real life one -- I find Braveheart to be one of the most intellectually stimulating movies of the past fifty years, and the directing is phenomenal), I continued on, determined to reach my artificial, chemically-induced Wawa high.

Once the dust cleared and I stared at the sandwich that lay before me, I started immediately bawling. I could not believe what I saw; such a disgrace to the culinary sanctuary that is Wawa I have never seen before. I have ordered this sandwich over 1453 times, and while I attribute it to my 65-pound weight gain over the past several years, I have never before seen such an atrocity. Where there should have been three chicken tenders, THERE WAS BUT ONE. One chicken tender! As if that could be a meal! I didn't order a meal FOR FLEAS! Who do you think I am? A pre-pubescent teenage girl who eats her meals ONE CHICKEN TENDER AT A TIME? I cannot express my outrage at this blatant LACK OF POULTRY. I would like the sandwich artist who created this monstrosity to be appropriately punished by the only penalty that can fit her crime - burning at the stake while tarred and feathered, hanging from a noose over an upturned needle containing greater than 30x the lethal dose of sodium pentathol. And I would like a rabid pack of animals consisting of one dog, a squirrel, and twelve pigs to take care of her remains. Actually, two dogs, so the one dog doesn't get lonely. Loneliness is one of the leading contributors to canine suicides, and being the owner of a beautiful, talented dog myself, I could not wish such hardship on any dog.

No, but really, I’m pretty pissed.

Yours truly,

Jon

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Got this response (obviously a form letter):

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Wawa Customer Relations [email protected]

5:36 AM (18 hours ago)

to me

Dear Jon,

Thank you for contacting Wawa! I would like to offer my sincere apologies that you were not satisfied with your recent purchase. Please let me assure you that I will communicate your disappointing experience to the General Manager at the store to ensure that all associates are retrained on proper food preparation. We consider the satisfaction of our customers to be our most important goal. There is no excuse for the incorrect product you received from this store.

We sincerely appreciate your valuable feedback and the opportunity you have given us to address this issue.

Sincerely,

Holly

Consumer Relations Specialist

Wawa, Inc

800-444-9292

Reference # 3643593

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Then I sent:

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Dearest Holly, 

I thank you for replying to my email. It is clear that Wawa puts about as much effort into its personalized email responses as it does into its delicious personalized sandwiches. I am glad, however, that you managed to correctly transfer my name from the form I filled out to the top of your email. Additionally, giving me a case reference number couldn't have been too easy - especially one with seven digits! Do you have a monkey throwing darts at large wooden squares representing the numbers 0-9? One time when my boss asked me to figure out how much we owed our client I got fed up and stole a monkey from the zoo (I guess I've made a habit of stealing animals) and handed him sharp-tipped darts to throw. It turns out that monkeys really can't throw darts too well, and not one hit a wooden square! So I told my boss we didn't owe the client anything, and he was ecstatic until he got arrested for fraud the next week. Also he did lots of blow.

I would like to inquire as to the method you use to train your associates. Do you send them to a culinary institute? If so, where is it? I saw an Olive Garden commercial once that said they send their chefs to a culinary institute in Italy. It looked pretty nice, but when I went to Olive Garden the food tasted like salty shit. Does Wawa have a similar school to train sandwich artists in Italy? I can imagine that your secret recipes are well kept in some kind of bank safe in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and though many have tried to find it, your hired security guards have kept the secrets safe. Nevertheless, what degree of security clearance must one have when he or she applies to become a sandwich artist at Wawa?

Additionally, I see that you will "communicate my disappointing experience" to the General Manager of the store I visited last night. I read between the lines, and I KNOW that you're planning to carry out the punishment I discussed in my previous email! I never read into things too much, but your phrasing is supremely transparent. I would like to beg you to spare her life, because she must entertain her clients at the other job she works at this place called Atlantis in west Philadelphia. When she told me she was an exotic dancer on nights and weekends, I figured she was simply interested in the dancing of native Pacific Islanders, but though I have never seen Pacific Islanders dance except for this one time I went to Atlantis, I can imagine why they keep to themselves. I certainly don't understand their culture, so I'm guessing the rest of the world doesn't either. 

I am glad you enjoyed my valuable feedback, as I have enjoyed your note, and I will wait eagerly for a response.

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I got 2 emails from them over the past two days, and I'll respond probably after my exam Tuesday:

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Wawa Customer Relations [email protected]

May 4 (2 days ago)

to me

Jon,

I am sorry you were not satisfied with Holly’s response.  I can assure you we followed up with the store management on this issue.  Unfortunately, they will be unable to tell you what punishment was doles out as they are sworn to secrecy.  If there is anything else we can do to help you please let us know.

Thank you,

Geoffrey

Wawa, Inc.

1-800-444-9292

Reference # 3643593

A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it. -The First Law of Mentat

Wawa Customer Relations [email protected]

May 4 (2 days ago)

to me

Hello Jon,

Your emails have been reviewed by the General Manager and the Area Manager of store 179, where you had the unfortunate experience of not enough chicken on your sandwich. They have requested that I send you a gift card for your experience and your excellent experience sharing skills. We also love that you were able to find some of those secret Wawa stores we have hidden around in various places on the East Coast. I am trying to send you a gift card but I see your address is A Hotel. I’m sure our mailroom won’t know where to direct this letter and gift card, so if you wouldn’t mind sharing a little bit of personal information with me, can you respond with your address so I can send this out to you? Of course, I will keep it confidential and will make sure you don’t receive any strange junk mail. Holly’s monkey and I will be looking forward to your response (a couple of these folks actually do have monkeys on their desks, they scream pretty loudly when thrown across the room).

Have a great weekend!

Maureen 

Wawa Customer Relations

1-800-444-9292