Corporate Idiots

[Chilidog]

ok. so the power went out. we received the following text from Xfinity (Comed)

Hi it's Xfinity Assistant. You may be experiencing issues with your services due to a power outage in or around your area. If you have power in your home, the network in your area may be damaged or without power. Once power is restored and the area is safe, we'll have you back up and running by approximately 04/03/2022 02:40 PM (Central). Stay safe and we appreciate your understanding. We'll text you when it's resolved.

Reply OUTAGE for any additional updates.

Txt help or stop
Msg&DataRatesMayApply

WTF is with the word salad? OK, i get the gist of it, but i should not have had to reread certain sentences to try and figure out what it’s supposed to mean.

[jcolvin2]

WTF is with the word salad? OK, i get the gist of it, but i should not have had to reread certain sentences to try and figure out what it’s supposed to mean.

The text reads like it was pre-written for a generic unspecified emergency/outage, with only the estimated time of completion to be inserted.

[W. Kevin Vicklund]

They must have a clone of me. That's almost word for word what I would have written. What's confusing about it?

[northland10]

Probably an automated bot with the pre-written text not composer or approved by customer engagement staff or corporate communications.

Probably not much engangement staff available given Comcast's hatred of spending any resources on customer service.

[roadscholar]

They must have a clone of me. That's almost word for word what I would have written. What's confusing about it?

Yes, it's clear to me. A power outage in or around (an important choice of words) a certain area could cause an outage of Comcast's service to an individual customer's home even if their AC power is still on.

[bill_g]

Oh. Is says OUT-AGE, not OUT-RAGE.

My ADD brain immediately included the letter R, and absolutely prevented me from seeing anything else.

[Tiredretiredlawyer]

They must have a clone of me. That's almost word for word what I would have written. What's confusing about it?

You'd make a good lawyer.

[raison de arizona]

My favorite one I got maybe twenty years ago was from a vendor supplying a hotfix to our mainframe software. In the instructions for applying the fix was the following sentence: "This is not a fix, but rather something to apply in order to avoid an error." I can only imagine there were contract lawyers involved in the wording of those instructions.

[northland10]

Many years ago I was testing builds of new reports in a new system which to replace the ones from a different system. The footnotes were not the ones from the old version. Instead, it looks like our developers (in Pune) translated it to their own language, and then translated it back to English on the new version or they attempted to copy what it said but in their own version of speaking English. To this day, I still don't know why they didn't just copy and paste the text from the old version.

Nowadays, we have some of the reports localized up to 8 other languages. To avoid some of the issues above, I will often send the text that was localized by our Global Communications area to our fundraising staff in our international offices. While our Global staff does fine, there are some things that require greater understanding of context and those in our international offices are communicating with constituents about the subject so they have a greater knowledge of the terminology that is used (or not used). Subject matter knowledge is important.

[W. Kevin Vicklund]

They must have a clone of me. That's almost word for word what I would have written. What's confusing about it?

You'd make a good lawyer.

No, but yes. (I'd make a terrible lawyer because I have trouble communicating due to traumatic brain injury) I have written the language for a dam break warning siren.

[pipistrelle]

ok. so the power went out. we received the following text from Xfinity (Comed)

Hi it's Xfinity Assistant. You may be experiencing issues with your services due to a power outage in or around your area. If you have power in your home, the network in your area may be damaged or without power. Once power is restored and the area is safe, we'll have you back up and running by approximately 04/03/2022 02:40 PM (Central). Stay safe and we appreciate your understanding. We'll text you when it's resolved.

Reply OUTAGE for any additional updates.

Txt help or stop
Msg&DataRatesMayApply

WTF is with the word salad? OK, i get the gist of it, but i should not have had to reread certain sentences to try and figure out what it’s supposed to mean.

Flesch-Kincaid says it’s 6th grade.

I find I have to re-reread when my mind wanders.