Throughout the late 1990s poet Joe Wenderoth was apparently a frequent visitor to Wendy's restaurants where he often would take time to fill out there "customer response cards" ("Please tell us about your Wendy's experience" and so on). In 2000 he collected his self-described epistles into a collection of prose poetry. I've recently come across a few of them and they're laugh-out-loud funny. Perhaps they will remind some of the customer interactions they've had. I've transcribed a few below (with as much blogfriendliness as possible). Do they have these cards at McDs?
August 26, 1996
Very high on brownies, I could not speak today at the register. I kept stepping aside for other customers and staring hard at the menu. I was overwhelmed by the chicken sandwich pictured there, but had no words for it. I kept saying, "there, that one...the man dressed like a woman." It's hard to get served when one understands the signifier as a process.
November 25, 1996
This idiotic notion that one should love the other customers. Love here really only means: agree, for the time being, not to attack. People pretend though, that each customer is an irreplaceable piece of some priceless puzzle--like the death of each customer is significant for every other customer. It's just not true; one cannot love what one does not know, and--fortunately--one knows very little.
January 3, 1997
I've been sort of hesistant to mention this, but I believe that one of your employees--you *must* know the one I speak of--is a beaver. It's impossible to look into her face, to hear the sounds she makes, and to see the way she moves, the way she carries bits of wood, and to not feel that *this is a beaver.* I've not mentioned this before because, obviously, beavers are powerful creatures.
3 comments:
Epistles-I like that word, much better than plain old letters! I've come across this word often in my reading, and I like it almost as much as ubiquitous.
Anyway, I really related to the second epistle. Who decided the 'customer is always right'? It is a very bad precedent. I've found customers to be very often, just plain wrong, rude and obnoxious.
Oh man. the last one has me crying. I wish I thought of stuff like this...
we used to write stuff like this all the time ... only for history class, because we were 100% sure that our professor never read the papers he assigned to us. Well, we got a lot of A's, and then Nick got in trouble, and the fun ended. Examples are nearly too ridiculous to cite here.
-m
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