November 23, 2007

Strongly-Worded Letter to RadioShack

November 12, 2007


RadioShack Corporation
Riverfront Campus World Headquarters
300 RadioShack Circle
Fort Worth, Texas 76102-1964


RE: Store 01-2498, Specifically Your Employee Named Ronald



Dear Computer or Auto-filtering Device,

I have often seen academics pen abstruse papers about the effects of late-capitalism on both goods and services. After hours of study I am now accustomed to reviews that have the benefit of being both accurate and unflattering. It is to those self-proclaimed scholars, however, that I commend your store, undivided from Ronald.

That I, in this day and age, can spend less than ten minutes of my fleeting time on earth walking into your place of business and purchasing a replacement for an importunate laptop cord is more than just exemplary--it is utterly breathtaking. In a world filled with clamant halfwits and self-satisfied sots, Ronald was, by contrast, both forthright and alert; both mindful of my time and unapologetically kind; both astonishingly well-informed and confoundingly humble.

It is not my place to comment on the disquieting and detestable lack of proficiency seen in the adolescents routinely hired by large corporations to act as their inapt ambassadors to the public. It is not my place to comment on the growing trend to automate all services so that those in search of help are forced to reckon with the cold, unthinking binary errors of a deficient programmer's refuse. It is my place to comment when I see those typical moulds broken instead of reinforced. In Ronald you have found your salvation--you will be receiving another letter if I find that he is being paid an incomplete amount for his especial efforts.


Skeptically yours,


/s/


Vincent Saint-Simon

November 13, 2007

Strongly-Worded Letter to The Wish Tank

Mr. Vincent St. Simon
**2 2nd ST **
Washington, D* 2****


Mr. St. Simon,


I write today to express my grave disappointment in the failure of the staff at The Wish Tank to produce timely work in a volume that might approach respectable. The most recent posting of August 9, 2007, was a pleasant read, but at this moment is more than three months stale. As a long-time donor, I expect that my funds are now being used for securing the services of cheap hookers, or perhaps the procurement of embarrassing amounts of crack-cocaine. In either case, our foundation does not provide grants of any amount for such purposes, and at this point is formally requesting an updated grant proposal outlining your action plan for aggressively pursuing a more mature publishing schedule. This is not, after all, The Onion. Failure to reply with the requested materials will result in an audit of your outlays and possible civil action against your person.


Sincerely yours,

/s/

Gregory T. Qualtheim
Founder, President, CEO, COO, CFO
The Qualtheim Foundation

August 9, 2007

Strongly-Worded Letter to Washington Mutual

9 August 2007

Washington Mutual Headquarters
1301 Second Ave.
Seattle, WA 98101


RE: The actions of your hollow shells, more specifically your crimes against humanity.


Dear Computer, Customer Service Representative in a Foreign Country, or Demon:

It is my fervent request that as of this moment you find someone in your office who is both sober enough to read and lucid enough to feel absolutely ashamed of your despicable company, your disgraceful objectives, and the corrupted sexual joy that your laborers feel while enacting the swindle you pass off as a service. Though I doubt that you will find such a person in your building the hours you send looking for one will, perhaps, save your conscience the everlasting task of repressing the assaults upon your fellow citizens that you routinely enact. If your direct supervisor isn't already telling you to lie to me to shut me up you can now move on to the next paragraph.

You stopped reading, but the nefarious fables that you make up so that you can avoid responsibility for the money that you were commissioned to steal from the American people, and one Ms. ahickpoet in particular, under the pretense that your company is both honest and well-intentioned (two terms in which take offense at the mere observation of your rotting souls) will come back to you in the moments of your old age when you realize that your lives have been a waste of breath, heinous in the eyes of Humanity.

Even as I write this, you are performing such perverse acts of capitalism that Adam Smith himself would slap you across your vampiric and revolting faces. I wouldn't dream of stopping him from doing so.

With All Outrage,

/s/

Vincent Saint-Simon

July 31, 2007

Strongly-Worded Letter to Joel L.

31 July 2007

Mr. Joel L.
c/o Candice S.
3**0 Mar***ta Dr.
Fl*****ant, MO 63**3


RE: The abhorrent state of Joel L.'s attempts at civil correspondence, and my disparaging comments thereupon.


Ms. Candice S.:

I write this to you since my mind revolts at the waste of time writing a strongly-worded letter to one Joel L. would be. In both his inadequate ability to understand the relationship between subjects and predicates, and his negligence of social sophistication, Mr. L. has proven himself on the same level as a brainless badger or unexceptional slab of tan-colored carpet. Penning a letter straight to him would be the same as asking a completely dotterel geoduck to dictate a memo or fix a crisp chicken salad sandwich. Instead, I am forced to ask you to please have the necessary consideration to read this letter to him when it comes to the attention of your person.

Mr. Joel L.: Your primitive motivations for even drawing my attention to your tedious person are so far below the capacities of my rational intellect that I absolutely refuse to consider them or you. Moreover, the unaccomplished barbs which you ceaselessly and aimlessly hurl in your attempt to goad me into a discussion with you will fall, as always, to join with the buffoonery of the other churls so easily dismissed. When, Mr. L., you blunder out of the coarse rationale you share with the other isopods into realm of passable politeness please feel free to reward yourself by finally breaching into my schedule for a worthwhile conversation. Until then, please filter all of your remarks through Ms. Candice S. so that they will have, at least, the merit of her thoughtful hand on their despicable contents.


Contemptuously Yours,

/s/

Vincent Saint-Simon

July 29, 2007

Strongly-Worded Letter to The Evergreen State College

29 July 2007


The Evergreen State College
2700 Evergreen Parkway NW
Olympia, Washington 98505


RE: A Failure on Your Part to Accommodate One Ms. L to the Best of Your Ability


Dear Unfortunate and Powerless Secretary, Intern, or Student Worker:

It has come to my attention that over the course of the past year you have committed a folly so great that your very reputation as an institution of value must at once be forsaken. Refusing, furthermore, to give satisfaction for your aggregate blindness puts you in the same class and grade as the most rude and contemptible Universities of Lower Learning. The next paragraph will be completely to my purpose of berating your name and station.

I cannot justify spending much time in stooping to communications with an academy so roundly foul, so I am compelled to keep this brief. Nothing in the world will account for Ms. L's benevolent condescension to allow your clearly debased pile of bricks and farce to house her for a term of four years in return for your comical and easily dismissed Bachelor's degree. Your abominable disinclination to fully compensate her for her altruistic interest in the hollow fraud you criminally refer to as a school is both hopelessly uncivil and the subject of this missive. Your failure to adhere to basic politeness is a telling indication of your rancorous inability to appreciate talent when it falls into your beastly lap, a revolting lunacy in your scholarship selections, and a thorough witlessness in your general personnel.

You are a chuff in sheep's clothing, Evergreen, and a mortification to your peers. I really thought you were of a higher station.



Yours in Derision,

/s/

Vincent Saint-Simon

July 9, 2007

Strongly-Worded Letter to the Embassy of Peru, Attn: Pablo Rojas (The Prominent Peruvian Human Rights Activist)

4 July 2007,


Embassy of Peru
1700 Massachusetts Ave. NW
Washington D.C. 20036
USA

Attn: Pablo Rojas (the prominent Peruvian human rights activist)

What I have to say is simple and there is nothing I would like to do more than to get straight to the point but before doing so I feel it necessary to briefly touch upon the reported events in your country of June of this year.

It was reported that during a generally very well received visit to Peru, Cameron Diaz (and I’ll give it to you, here and now, that she is one of the most dismissible Hollywood actresses the United States must hesitatingly call its own) was seen and photographed wearing a green handbag with a red star and the Maoist political slogan (one of Mao’s favorite) “Serve the People” (printed in Chinese). Diaz’s worthlessness is of course not the subject of this missive. The report, put out by the AP via Yahoo(!?), went on to say:

A prominent Peruvian human rights activist said the star of There's Something About Mary should have been a little more aware of local sensitivities when picking her accessories. "It alludes to a concept that did so much damage to Peru, that brought about so many victims," said Pablo Rojas about the bag's slogan. "I don't think she should have used that bag where the followers of that ideology" did so much damage.

Indeed, your country, at the hands of the Maoist Guerilla Sendero Luminoso, and his Shining Path insurgency, was brought to the edge of chaos in the 1980s and early 1990s with a campaign of massacres, assassinations, and bombings that took the lives of nearly 70,000 people, and you are right, as a “prominent human rights activist” to point out to the politico-historical negligence of Americans in general and Diaz specifically (she is quite the twit isn’t she?).

What I don’t understand, and perhaps, Mr. Rojas, you can help me, is how you can appear so surprised? And, if you were indeed surprised by Diaz’s actions, I find this very troubling given your country’s current politico-economic path. It is unfortunately true that half of Peru’s population lives in poverty and as a “prominent human rights activist” I’m sure you're actively pursuing all the things that will make it possible for your county’s people to live more like Americans, that is to say, with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property (happiness). Indeed your country’s constitutional republic has already taken many steps in the long and hard process toward liberalization which has already put an end to price controls, discarded protectionism, eliminated restrictions on foreign direct investment and privatized most state companies. Such reforms have given your country sustained economic growth since 1993. These things I’m sure, as “prominent human rights activist,” you’re well aware of. But, what seems to have gotten past you is that in a society that's on it’s way to being governed not by Mao’s definition of the ‘people,’ nor your constitutional republic’s definition of the ‘people,’ but by the interests of the few people who turn the switches and knobs to the global free market economy, there is no meaning to the market of symbolic exchange, “why does a stupid American actress wear the new Maoist-red-star-handbag?” “Because it’s cool, that’s why.” There is no room for petty cultural/historical scars; there’s no crying in capitalism (unless of course you can find a way to fetch a price for your tears [try eBay]). Indeed those people who want to join in the fun of a, or rather, the capitalist market—fantasizing about frolicking between the rows and rows of surplus commodities that appear to speak to each man (or woman) made consumer and to each other on the shelves—must check their memory-cards at the door in exchange for their object of desire, their very own property, that is to say, happiness.

Forgetting already why I wrote to you,

/s/

Curt Bozif

June 17, 2007

Strongly-Worded Letter to Major Pierre Charles L'Enfant

17 June 2007


Major Pierre Charles L'Enfant
6 feet from the north line of Gen. Sheridan's lot
Arlington National Cemetery
Arlington, Virginia 22211

RE: Your Odious City Plan for Washington, DC

attn: Major L'Enfant:

The mere fact that I feel compelled to pen this missive incites me almost as much as your actual offense, and believe me, sir, when I tell you that my level of indignation is both uplifted and upraised. Your reckless and wasteful treatment of this, the capital of the United States of America, is the equivalent of treason. You were given the opportunity to create a grand symbol out of your city plan, and instead your gratuitous doodle has become a mar upon your record and the archetype for action without common sense.

In, it appears, an attempt to further my fury, you then entreated the legal system, of the government that your construction so effectively scorned mind you, to give you economic acclimation for your folly to the tune of 95,500 American dollars. Your actions show you to be the most vile of villains, and if you thought for a second that you would be able to suck off our state while secretly building a city so depraved in its planning that it could have easily been drawn up by a fourth-grader with a behavior disorder then you, sir, deserve no better than the poverty that was your succulent reward. Please do not consider your reputation secure in death; I simply will not stand for the hubris.

Condescendingly Yours,

/s/

Vincent Saint-Simon

June 16, 2007

Strongly-Worded Letter to Arnold Bread

16 June 2007


Consumer Relations Department
Arnold Bread
c/o George Weston Bakeries
P.O. Box 976
Horsham, PA 19044
800-984-0989

RE: Your Gratifying Bread and the Dissemination Thereof

Dear Gentleperson:

Over the course of the last few days I have found myself in the company of a loaf of bread provided by yourselves to satiate my hunger. It is a 15 Grain loaf, and I have a few words about it that require your undivided attention. Please continue to read.

Thank you. Over the course of my life I have exhausted no shortage of bread products and it is with a keen sense for taste that I now write in your defense. Your bread, far from cutting corners, delights in the amount of Grains it proudly proclaims on the label. Any rational human being could, if they weren't already jaded by the pitiful fare Sara Lee attempts to pass off as wheat, count the different grains in their mouths and still miss a few. That you have lowered yourself to providing the average American with such a product is a high testament to your nobility and mettle.

Unfortunately, you are not doing enough. There are still those who are being subjected to the gruel produced in the filthy, mold-infested industrial factories of Pepperidge Farms and their ilk. Those people, too, are citizens and they need your help. Your choice to market your bread only in certain regions instead of making it the sensation it was destined to be hurts both yourself and those who are begging for your mercy. Please immediately desist with any campaign you have in place to keep your bread out of groceries everywhere, and please do not hesitate to immediately and vociferously attack and destroy those manufacturers of artificially induced grain that flatter themselves with the title of your 'competition.' You are leading us out of the dark ages of grain, but I beg you to travel as swift as light.

Yours in Enchantment,

/s/

Vincent Saint-Simon

June 14, 2007

Strongly-Worded Letter to The Library of Congress

8 June 2007


The Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave, SE
Washington, DC 20540


RE: The State of Your Library, More Specifically Your High Capacity for Foolishness

Dear Sir, Madam, or Guerilla:

I had the distinct displeasure of touring your library in the recent past, and I was abashed to find that you have reached a state of complete disaster. I didn't think that it could take longer for a tax paying American citizen to get a library card than for a witless and constipated Giant Panda to arduously force out a fecal mixture of Bamboo and Pineapple while being made a spectacle of, but after having the opportunity to witness both, you have proven me wrong and, for your part, your inane performance was far more dissatisfying.

That you continued to assault my person with your rigorous and well-executed twaddle and triviality, both in your heinous bureaucratic rules and your disengaged staff, only solidifies for me your reputation as a place passionately against the dissemination of knowledge or the use of common sense. Waiting for three hours for six books while your lunkheads desperately try to remember how to count past ten is not an acceptable way to run a library. Getting a meager one book (of eight requested) after three hours of waiting, only to discover that your employees had brought the wrong book, is gross incompetence on your part.

Your conduct is of the worst sort and variety; I advise you to repair it at your earliest convenience.

Disappointedly Yours,

/s/

Vincent Saint-Simon

Strongly-Worded Letter to the New Yorker

18 May 2007


The New Yorker

4 Times Square
New York, NY 10036


RE: The general state of The New Yorker, and more specifically its rudeness

To Whom it May Concern, But Mostly to the Senior Staff:

I make the very broad assumption here that you actually possess the ability to read, and if I am mistaken (as I probably am) then you'll have to forgive the oversight as one of your volunteer readers recites this missive to you. Please be aware that when he or she is sounding out the words it is not due to my intention, but rather it is the result of their complete lack of expertise. We're changing paragraphs. Please keep up as best you can.

It is not of my concern that the waste of paper you accidentally refer to as a magazine has abandoned any form of literary ingenuity. It is not of my concern that your poems are of a lower caliber than those written by the most vacuous of middle-school students and teachers, nor is it my concern that you have no constancy toward merit and that your only qualifications for getting published are that the self-proclaimed author must make you feel pretty and compliment your sister's new haircut (though in no way have you earned a compliment on your looks and your sister's haircut looks almost as bad as your cardboard-and-stickers website). It is also not of my concern that the only talent you appear to possess is the miraculous ability to maraud your own (formerly) good name. Those are all things that your staff will have to deal with when they finally change out of their diapers into big kid undies. The horizon and scope to which I remain consistently and diligently disappointed in you is the cavalier attitude that you are now extending from your prose to your coverage of the news, and to a certain organization in particular. If you were worth the time it takes to edit this letter, I would put something really scathing right here.

When this certain organization holds an event, New Yorker, you will, henceforth, make it a point to be in attendance. It is clear by your wan news coverage and, I might add, novice-level essays and op/eds that you have lost the ability to make rational decisions for yourself. If you can't somehow muster the minimal amount of dedication that it takes to put your flat rumps into seats and listen to what those that are far smarter than you have to say (even if you won't understand it), then you will no longer have the privilege of choice. While you hold meetings to discuss how your staff is going to tank your magazine today and every other day that they come to work, please don't hesitate to be ashamed of yourselves. You deserve a personal scolding from every single person who lives in New York. I'll settle for the knowledge that in another two years you will be a joke.

With Due Scorn,

/s/

Vincent Saint-Simon

April 1, 2007

The Wish Tank Official Letterhead



Send us an e-mail and we'll send you a high quality PDF of the official Wish Tank letterhead for your very own strongly-worded letter.