Capsule of Absurdity No. 1

To the delight of my readers around the world, I am starting today a new section. As the title suggests, this post inaugurates a series of installments that will deal with absurd events that occur to me (or to people I know that don't have a nice blog). This should be a good deal for everyone: I will spend less time producing a post and you will waste less time reading my pseudo interesting remarks. In any case, the cool thing about absurd events is that they can be many things at the same time: sad, funny, lame, etc. Reading about absurd events it's like observing things and, as they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

This capsule deals with a prominent aspect of Italian culture: the relation Italians have with the English language. (I can anticipate many future capsules will deal with Italy, I am afraid. This is a fertile land for absurdity.) The other day, by a combination of a faulty software and stupidity of mine, my Philips MP3 reader started to work in a weird way. It was usable, but the file system was a mess. Then I realized the firmware of it was quite outdated, and decided to update it. I read all the manuals and followed all the instructions to do so. Once the firmware upgrade was ready, the device didn't start. Nothing at all, it was dead.

Once again, I tried every trick manuals suggested, but nothing worked. Then I went to the Philips website, looking for further info. Nothing. My case wasn't listed in the manuals. Great. Then I went to the customers service website, and filed a complaint. In what it seemed to be a centralized website to do that, apart from my complain and info about my problem, I provided info on my location (country, city, address). The site was completely in English, so I wrote my case in English, and expected an answer from someone in, say, India.

The component of absurdity arises in what follows. Two days (!) after having filed the complaint/question I received the following email (in Italian) from the Philips people:

Dear Customer,
Thanks for contacting us.
We will be happy to answer your question and/or help you in your problem, as long as you write to us in Italian.
Thanks for understanding us.
Greetings,
Debora M.
Philips Customer Care Centre

I can understand that customer service teams are not equipped with multilingual personnel. But come on, Debora: you work solving problems with devices that involve some kind of technology, you gotta know some English! I can easily imagine the "Philips Customer Care Centre" in some Italian city. The "centre" should be nothing more than a group of 4-5 people trained to answer stupid questions following some predefined answers that come in a book. I guess the email I received is one of the most complicated things they have to do: to deal with inquiries in strange languages (or dialects). I wouldn't be surprised if someone tells me Debora is the supervisor of the "centre".

The story with my MP3 continued with me sending an email in Italian, Debora replying to it with some useless information ("try to upgrade the firmware again, and if that doesn't work I hope you're still covered by the warranty"), and me desperately formatting the MP3 player using Windows. (I had nothing to lose, either that worked or by upgrading I had obtained a USB key with a useless screen.) Luckily, the Windows formatting worked and my MP3 reader is now upgraded and functioning. And some stupid Debora wasn't helpful at all.

Next in "Capsules of Absurdity": all the things that can go wrong in a strike day in Paris.