#FAIL

[bellinghman]

Dear HBOS

Thank you for sending me the updated terms and conditions for my Halifax Current Account last Friday.

And thank you for sending me the updated terms and conditions for my Halifax Savings Accounts yesterday.

I am particularly taken by the thoughtful way you attempt to mitigate the impact of the production of the leaflets by putting prominent signs urging people to recycle them.

However ...

Perhaps you didn't need to send me a copy for each of the accounts I have? You might like to tell your programming bods about the DISTINCT keyword in SQL. That way, you'd have sent me only one copy of the applicable savings account leaflets, you'd have saved an extraneous 360 grammes of printed material, and I'd have saved the time carefully looking for any differences before coming to the conclusion that in all of this, I had only two different sets of leaflets.

Till next time

Me

Comments

[mobbsy.livejournal.com]

I've worked at an organisation where a junior DBA made exactly that error when producing a customer list for a targeted marketing brochure (i.e. a list of people who'd bought some of a specific subset of products). It wasn't caught at any point further up the chain. The first I knew about it was as a customer when I received 5 copies of the brochure through the post.

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

Were they the same terms and conditions for your different accounts?

[perdita-fysh.livejournal.com]

I know some girls for whom the reverse approach was an endless repeating problem.

Their names are Meena and Meera P., and until they moved out of the family home they not only received a single copy of communications between them, every year their bank tried to merge their accounts. Until one of them moved to another bank in frustration.