Letters, prey?

Every month a document is circulated around my place of work detailing all the feedback received from members of the public via the company website. As you'd expect, it makes for both enlightening and enervating reading.

April's gems included one person accusing my employer of being obsessed with the "stupid face" of David Beckham, another moaning about the lack of coverage ceded to the Boat Race, and a third appealing for syndicated reports, over which my employer has no control, to no longer contain any references to kilometres and instead express everything in miles. Or rather, in their words, "WE ARE NOT IN KILOMETERS IN THIS COUNTRY - we are MILES!!!"

Slightly more obtuse was a complaint about a lot of Greek propoganda about Macedonia, a protest about the absence of a white sheep emoticon, and two separate pleas concerning the way a picture of the Queen was making the writer feel sick.

These comments were all anonymous, of course. However I fail to see the point in using this kind of feedback as a measure of your organisation's popularity (or lack of). The only people who respond to this kind of invitation to leave comments will be those who have a point to make or a score to settle. If somebody is content with the service they are getting they will never bother to write and say so. If somebody is really really unhappy, though, or exceptionally ecstatic, that's when you'll get the feedback. Hence it is always skewed towards the extreme. Hence it makes for a poor bellwether of how your organisation is performing. And hence it tends to leave you, the employee, with less rather than more clarity about what is right and what is wrong.

Plus a mental picture of someone throwing up over a picture of Her Majesty.