Dictated But Not Read

ATTN:

To whom it may concern:

I have been a compliant customer long enough. During the fall, I signed up for On Demand with unlimited channels for the first three months. Within this three month period, I have encountered inadequate service, to say the least—not to mention an ungodly amount of ignorance and stupidity. 

My initial installation was canceled without warning, resulting in my spending an entire Saturday sitting on my fat ass waiting for your technician to arrive. When he didn’t arrive, I spent the next hour listening to the bleach gargled static you call hold-music, with the occasional pop-in of some robot woman telling me to look at your oh-so-helpful website.

I’ve made numerous calls to your NO-help line where a variety of disinterested humanoid lackeys played a game of not it—informing me that I’d be transferred to someone who knows whether or not a telephone line is available, then be immediately cut off, or redirected to an answering machine telling me that your office is closed, or sent back to that cock sucking robot woman.

The rescheduled installation then took place some two weeks later, where the asshole technician forgot to bring a number of vital tools—you know, a drill-bit, wiring, his piss poor cerebrum.

Undoubtedly, you are no longer reading this letter, as you probably have at least a thousand other dissatisfied customers to ignore, but frankly, I could give two shits. It’s far more satisfying as a customer to voice my frustrations in print than to shout them at Kenny G molesting me on hold.

In fact, I’m not even really upset with all of that. Customer relations has been a dying breed ever since technology has risen up out of the inexorable muck. My real complaint is something much more virulent. With all the time I’ve wasted waiting on your company’s holistic services, I was able to think, that is to say, evaluate the situation you as an irresponsible prick are administrating. I come home every night to an empty house, into an empty room, and lay in an empty bed, and allow the empty noise—the noise you sell me—to wash over and drown my worries. My children don’t talk to me, my ex-wife is lying out on a curb somewhere pumped full of god knows what, punks are running wild in the streets, and there’s more and more death every day. This world is getting worse, and as I sit here on my fat ass watching it slowly whittle and die through a television screen, I fear for humanity. I fear for what we’ve become—so what do I do … IGNORE IT! I change the channel and allow the sublime bullshit reset my emotions.

Fear shouldn’t dictate my life. I’d rather face my fears like a human being than continue on being some numb humanoid—and that’s what you create, desensitized humanoid pissants. I know what you are, what you’re doing to the people around you—your customers, your employees … you have somehow reduced your miserable shitty life and everyone else’s to the common debris of banality. You’re a virus living out your days in an illusive immutable tranquilized state of bullshit, believing that every inflated word that secretes out of your pale, gristled mouth is some entertaining thought on truth. You’re the embodiment of rectal scum. Do you even remember what it’s like to be a human being, with real issues and emotions? You take sewage infested dish static and cram it into our stupid faces like we have to have it … Don’t miss tonight’s show! You gotta check this out! You’re creating empty people—draining them of any kind of individualistic trait for a mere profit. We are the only thing between you and the shrieking nothingness that you’re slowly driving future generations toward. We are all doomed if this continues on. My mind is finally clear.

Now, on the off-chance that you have continued to read on, I just want you to know that I have rubbed my testicles all over this letter. Juvenile? Yes, but I like the thought of you, sitting behind your marble desk, in a nice tailored suit with a fresh and expensive haircut, reading this and laughing at the thought of some no named schmuck—which I’m assuming you only see as a dollar sign—obsessing over the turmoil of your company’s services, while the juicy mucus of my unwashed nether regions marinate inside the pores of your fingers and palms.

My business with your company is terminated as of today … for I have better things to do.

Have a nice day.
– Unsatisfied Consumer

Brad Naftzger is a Michigan writer that blends absurdism, realism, and the search for personal meaning through ordinary life in works such as Out of My Peripheral, The Two Witnesses, and Nocturnus. He is currently working on his novel, Janus-faced, a dark story abysmally told through a nameless protagonist, locked in a fugue state, being led into the woods by his sister.