Tears for Sears

I have this cool trick that works wonders with corporations. It’s called the “Executive Mailbomb”. Here’s how it works. When you get less than expected service from some company or other don’t waste your time trying to work your way up through the food chain. Sooner or later some mid level asshat is going to close you out. No matter how much you may wish ask to speak with their manager they will insist that “computer says no”.

Instead do the following. Go to their corporate website and find the names of their executive management, their CEO, their VP’s etc. The names are easy to find, these guys love the spotlight, it’s all about their careers after all. Now you are going to want their email addresses. These are impossible to find on the web as the last thing a company wants is the ability for their customers to speak directly to their senior management so here’s where it gets a bit technical.

All corporations have a predictable way of creating their business email addresses. They have to be predicatable, so that the Exchange guys can create them without making duplicates and so internal staff can work out what they are without using the address book. If you can work out the pattern that the company uses then you can work out the email addresses of the guys you want to send to. For example the email address format will be joe.bloggs@company.com or jbloggs@company.com or joeb@company.com or whatever. The best way to find out how they do email is to go to their domain record using a WHOIS. There is always an administrative email and a technical email address in there. That will give you the corporate email pattern. Then it is just a simple matter of inserting the names you collected of the corporate website into the pattern and et voila you are now mana el mana with the President of the offending company.

This last week it was Sears that felt the effect of the CEO email. We had bought a set of appliances for my in-laws for their 50th wedding anniversary. Despite being told for two weeks that it would be delivered on the day we were called up 4 days before the big day to be told that we wouldn’t get the goods until far too late. Despite the efforts of the sales folks (who were all nice people btw) the computer just kept saying no.

So I used this trick to veto said computer. The CEO replied to me within 15 minutes and I was chatting with the VP of Logistics just a few hours later. Needless to say, there was much anguish and scurrying about by the little people at Sears and 4 days later all of our appliances appeared in our driveway. Boomer! Now ususally I am a bit cruel about companies when I write this sh*t but actually I was pretty impressed by how much energy and rule bending the folks at Sears were prepared to exhibit when the CEO became our temporary best buddy. Ha bloody ha.

Corporations, never underestimate their desire to be bland

Corporations. If you have ever worked inside one then you know just how arbitrary their decision making processes are. They are all a bunch of spineless p***ks who will do anything to be ordinary. If you want to change a corporate policy, just offer to make whining noises about <insert cause here> and pretty soon they’ll cave in and do whatever it is that will allow them to shrink back into the shadowy world of brand comfort.

Why am I so pissed about corporations today? Well I’m not really, it’s just that my local coffee chain, the mighty Tim Horton’s, has arbitrarily decided to stop giving out free “timbits” (nasty little doughy packages of cholesterol, what you would find dropping out the back of a doughnut-o-raptor if they still roamed the Earth) to anyone with a dog in the drive-thru.

Apparently, and this wins for weak-ass excuse of the day, they were getting a few complaints from people who objected to the dogs getting a free timbit and their nasty snot-nosed offspring being refused. I have one answer for them, at least my dogs have a full set of chromosomes.

There are two options here. Either the offered excuse is true or it isn’t. If it’s true then Jesus ”tap-dancing” Christ I don’t know who to feel worse for, the miserable sacks of flesh whose sense of entitlement was offended by the sight of a small dog getting a break or the spine-free member of the Tim Horton’s operations team who decided it was easier to cave in than to listen to that b***hing.

If the offered excuse is untrue then some recent graduate from the Uri Geller Academy of Spoon Bending has managed to wing their way through the interview process and all the way to the Arbitrary Decisions department at Tim Horton’s central office deep underground in the Vinson Massif. I will still buy my coffee from Tim’s. He is after all one of the dieties central to my belief system, my pantheon if you please. But from now on I will remember that his feet are clay.