Let there be Cheap Heat! (or at least heat that won't prevent my future children from attending college)

I think it goes without saying that I'm a tad sarcastic. Over the years my sarcasm has been the cause of some unpleasantness. As a kid it often resulted in groundings, in high school it resulted in more than one occasion where I was asked if I wanted my ass kicked, and as an adult it's resulted in festive feedback in performance reviews like "she doesn't suffer fools easily" and "could improve on empathy". Sounds like a bad news story huh? Not entirely.

Sarcasm usually means you're witty, wit requires more than two brain cells and more than two brain cells makes you smarter than most. These three things put together makes for one hell of a complaint letter. I can't remember what made me angry enough to write the first letter but over the years there have been a few gems.

Avis was one of my favorites. For six long months I stood in the blazing Atlanta sun frying in line at the Avis "Preferred" kiosk while the non-preferred customers stood in air conditioning. Invariably I received the crappiest, smelliest car. I decided I had driven my last nasty car so I started my letter. I described for them my last five rental experiences- the dirty feet smell, sweating my butt off to show them my credit card for the 3,629th time, the lack of cars, the ones that ran like tractors, I unloaded. I figured out who all their senior level officers were and cc them. Stamp, stamp, stamp and forget about it.

A few weeks later my cell phone rang. The guy on the other end of the line identified himself as the President of Avis Rent a Car. He told me that he has a staff of people who read and deal with complaint letters but his staff brought my letter to his attention. In the 20 years he had been with Avis he had never seen such an awful letter. He wanted to personally apologize and was wondering if I would mind spending some time with his Atlanta General Manager. As you can imagine, this ended very well for me. It also made me realize something. While my experience was irritating, it certainly couldn't have topped the list of truly awful things Avis had ever done to people. I hadn't exaggerated but I suppose it was the presentation of fact combined with "colorful" descriptions that had caught their attention.

I used to have a boss who said "fact and dater, sweetheart. They always win". Yes, dater. He was a New Yorker and data always came out sounding like dater. (Important note: he was the only one I ever let call me sweetheart at work. He was old and cute and he liked me, so I allowed it.) Barring other influences, he was right and especially right when it came to things like Customer Service.

This came in handy when we had the apartment fire. Sure, I had renter's insurance, but that's the sort of chip you cash in when some nutter burns up the place with a candle or a cigarette. I suspected our fire was caused by the management company. So I called the Philadelphia FD investigation unit and found out that with $25 and a form I could request a copy of the investigator's report. When the management company claimed that they couldn't possibly pay for our dry cleaning and that if we wanted to we could probably sue PECO. "Good luck suing the city" was her response. I said, "You're probably right. I called the PFD and I'm ordering a copy of the investigation report. I guess that will give me what I need to sue PECO huh?" Twenty minutes later she called me back to tell me that she had worked out something with her boss and they would take care of our furniture and dry cleaning. Gosh, how nice of them. The whole affair ended with a check for $2,500 and our signature on the dotted line that we wouldn't sue them.

So when we moved into our newly renovated apartment and found that our heating and cooling units were from 1982 I was a little perturbed. This quickly became anger when I received my first electric bill to the tune of $275. The entire month of August the units ran on high and we still couldn't get the temperature below 75 degrees. It would seem to me that the average person would draw several conclusions from this fact. They did not. Instead I got every excuse in the book: the place in concrete - it retains heat, it's the humidity - this is a really hot month and my personal favorite - have you ever paid Center City electricity charges before, you know cooling is expensive here. These people didn't know who they were dealing with. I pulled our kilowatt usage for the last year and a half, researched the average temperature from July & August '07 & '08 and started my work. Go figure, August last year and this year were the exact same mean temperature. Last year we used half the electricity we had this year. I then compiled a list of all the similarities of the two apartments including the square footage. I also used their own goofy marketing of this place as "luxury living" against them. Last week they finally replaced the stupid units and my last electric bill is under review.

So if you need help with a letter, I'm available. Let there be heat and stamps for all!