Rick Broadhead - Dear Valued Customer: You Are a Loser: And Over 100 Other Embarrassing and Funny Stories of Technology Gone Mad

DEAR VALUED CUSTOMER, YOU ARE A LOSER

Copyright 2004 by Rick Broadhead. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews. For information, write Andrews McMeel Publishing, an Andrews McMeel Universal company, 1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64106.

E-ISBN: 978-1-4494-1312-5

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2003045248

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CONTENTS

Most Pathetic Rescue from a Vending Machine

A warm thank-you to Patty Rice at Andrews McMeel for believing in this book and for her invaluable suggestions; to my agents, Kim Witherspoon and Alexis Hurley, for sharing their professional advice and acting as my sounding board; to Jim Carroll for giving me my start in publishing; and to Mom, Dad, Lionel, and Kristin for their unwavering love and support.

W elcome to the inaugural edition of Dear Valued Customer, You Are a Loser, a humorous celebration of the unintended consequences of modern, everyday technology.

Ive long been a fan of books like Ripleys Believe It or Not and the Guinness Book of World Records, and this book was born out of my attempts to document and catalog some of the strangest and most memorable technological oddities of all time.

Most of the stories presented here describe humorous, bizarre, or unfortunate incidents that were to some degree caused or facilitated by technology. For good measure, Ive also included some classic hoaxes and other offbeat stories that have earned their own unique place in history. Incredible as they may seem, all of the stories are true unless otherwise indicated.

Ive decided to open the book with the story of two Seattle businessmen, Shane Atchison and Tom Farmer (www.zaaz.com), who rocked the business world with their widely circulated PowerPoint presentation called Yours Is a Very Bad Hotel. After receiving a rude reception at an upscale hotel in Houston, Shane and Tom created the presentation as a creative way to vent their frustration and express their anger at the way they were treated. The graphic complaint was forwarded to the hotels manager and a few of Shanes and Toms close friends, but it unexpectedly got passed around by e-mail and quickly found a worldwide audience on the Internet, much to the dismay of the hotels management. Shane and Tom have kindly given their permission for several of their infamous slides to be reproduced in this book. I hope you laugh as hard as I did when I first came across their incredible story.

S hane Atchison and Tom Farmer of Seattle, Washington, are heroes to customer service advocates everywhere. After receiving shabby service at a major hotel, the two business executives fought back and won, proving that customers everywhere have more power than they realize. All it takes is a bit of creativity.

Shane Atchison and Tom Farmer, November 2001

I n November 2001, Atchison and Farmer flew from Seattle to Texas for a business trip. They had a guaranteed reservation at an upscale hotel in Houston, but when they showed up at the front desk at 2 A.M. , weary after a long plane ride, they discovered their room had been given away earlier in the evening.

To make matters worse, they were greeted by an unsympathetic and unapologetic desk clerk named Mike.

Fuming with anger, Shane and Tom vented their frustration in a rather unconventional waythey created a seventeen-slide PowerPoint presentation about the manner in which they were treated and promptly e-mailed it to the hotel and several of their friends. The presentation was humorously titled Yours Is a Very Bad Hotel.

A graphic complaint prepared for:

General Manager

Front Desk Manager

ABC Hotel

Houston, Texas

The original slides contained the actual name of the establishment, but it was later removed and replaced with ABC Hotel to give the hotel some much-needed anonymity.

The PowerPoint presentation contained a variety of witty slides, including one depicting the career path of the unhelpful desk clerk who greeted them at the hotel in the wee hours of that November morning. There was also a dictionary definition of the word guarantee, quotes from the unapologetic desk clerk, an entertaining display of probability statistics, and a bar graph illustrating the amount of money that Shane and Toms firm shelled out annually for hotel accommodations in the Houston area.

Lifetime chances of dying in a bathtub: 1 in 10,455

(National Safety Council)

Chance of Earth being ejected from the solar system by the gravitational pull of a passing star: 1 in 2,200,000

(University of Michigan)

Chance of winning the UK Lottery: 1 in 13,983,816

(UK Lottery)

Chance of us returning to the ABC Hotel Houston: worse thanany of those

(And what are the chances youd save rooms for us anyway?)

Shanes and Toms friends were so impressed with the PowerPoint slides that they couldnt resist e-mailing them to their friends. In turn, those friends e-mailed the presentation to their friends, and so on. You can guess what happened next.

We are Tom Farmer and Shane Atchison of Seattle, Washington.

We held guaranteed, confirmed reservations at the ABC Hotel for the night of November 14-15.

These rooms were held for late arrival with a major credit card.

Tom is a card-carrying Frequent Guest at ABC Hotel

Yet when we arrived at 2:00am we were refused rooms!