I have an email address on file with nearly every service and vendor I use. (Thank goodness for the feature on Gmail that allows me to append +whatever to my user name!)
Every now and then, one of these yahoos sends me an email that makes me scratch my head, like the one from BMG Music dated August 11.
Now, first of all, I’m not exactly what you’d call a fan of country music. Sure, there are a few songs here and there that I like, but overall I find country music obnoxious and twangy, and it’s not something I go out of my way to enjoy. Further, in my umpteen years as a BMG member, I have not once ordered any CD even closely resembling country music. How they concluded that I not only like country music, but that I get a chubby for Toby Keith (*shudder*) is beyond me.
This was preceded only a couple of days earlier by an email I received from Dish Network reminding me about the then-forthcoming Olympics. In Korean.
Baffled, I shot off a quick note to Dish to ask them why I got an email composed in Korean. I even touched on the fact that the text wasn’t even set as text, but as a graphic which is generally a no-no. I received a response from a Michelle C.
Thank you for your e-mail. We apologize for the inconvenience. The problem has been identified and will be rectified.
Um. Okay.
And really, this is nothing. What offends me more are the assumptions companies make about me solely based on my last name, which is obviously Spanish in origin. This probably wouldn’t be such a big deal if I actually spoke Spanish. Since I don’t, their assumptions become increasingly annoying.
Sometimes, on calls to vendors I (or someone calling on my behalf when I’m not able to for whatever reason) will get transferred to a Spanish-speaking representative when I gave no indication otherwise that I need to speak to one.
Until a few months ago, I received offers written entirely in Spanish for credit cards and other services. Last month, I received a subscription to Hispanic Magazine, which greeted me with a “Thanks for requesting your subscription” message attached to the first issue.
I never requested it. I stopped subscribing to magazines about a year ago.
When I was in college and selected my courses, I was required to pick a foreign language course. I picked an intermediate Spanish course to pick up where I left off in high school. The school placed me in a native speaker’s course which I barely passed in the fall and dropped out of in the spring (and then mostly because the professor was a dick).
Despite reminders to them to the contrary, it happens all the time. Sometimes, that makes me feel out of touch, and I really don’t think I’m that off.
