I just read an article about a woman who had visited her aging father and happened to see one of his meals brought in by a meal service. She thought the food was too small in quantity and inedible in quality.
What did she do at this point? Instead of contacting the company providing the food, she took a picture of it and posted a long whine about it on Facebook. This took on and lo and behold soon enough the yellow press takes notice. On the article the woman then says she often gives the food to her dogs and cooks something herself for her father.
Clearly she lives close enough to her father to do this on regular basis, so why doesn’t she cook for her father and cancel the food service? I mean, a big pot of soup in the fridge for a week is enough for one serving a day and then some.
Also, in the article the food service company representative says they receive very few complaints regarding the size of the meals or the quality of the food. Admittedly, I couldn’t have said what the food was judging by the picture alone. It was a potato and sausage casserole, as identified by the article, and generally that’s not supposed to look like much.
Generally, this is the course of any Finnish social media rage. Someone thinks something is wrong, and instead of complaining to the relevant company or organization whines about it online. Then likeminded individuals start sharing this perceived injustice and not too long after the media takes interest.
Most of the time there really is no problem a replacement or a refund wouldn’t fix. That would of course require giving up the pleasure of airing out one’s disappointments in public, all the while making it seem like they were treated worse than they truly were. Would they handle the matter the old fashioned way, they would be deprived of public apologies and bigger reparations than they would truly be due.
At my own job, this is sometimes so blatantly obvious in people’s behavior that I most times just want to laugh. One guy parked his car wrong and got a ticket at our parking lot. He then proceeded to write a customer complaint where he admitted he had done a mistake (the ticket was valid, I mean to say) but demanded that the ticket be paid back to him and then some. What did my employer do? Paid his ticket and gave him gift cards over the value of the ticket.
WHAT the actual FUCK?
Were I the one who responded to these, I would have informed the customer that he should take the matter up with the instance that does the parking monitoring, that being the City of H. I would have then proceeded to inform him that although the store is very sorry for such an occurrence, the restrictions to parking are clearly marked all around the area. Furthermore, as he himself admitted he was aware of the fact, there was really nothing more I could do for him.
We don’t really need his business, do we? Let the competitor have him and pay his parking tickets.
I sometimes wonder when did people become this selfish? They are willing to rip someone down for any perceived injustice without giving them no chance of defending themselves. After all, once someone has written a public post like that on Facebook and has garnered everyone’s sympathy by their enhanced story, anything said to counter it is easily dismissed as excuses.
There are so many different branches to this same issue I can’t possibly keep it in one post. It’s not just on social media that people do this, sadly. And it’s not just about these “service situations” either, but pervasive of the society on a wider base.
I’ll just stop before I write that second post right here and now…
The Eyrie 