One for the Pet Hates series. It's become fashionable to be a bit wacky or matey in marketing communications to customers. But this is a bit risky, as you don't know what mood thery're in.
So in this example, the response email to an order I placed tells me how excited the autoresponder is to get my business (blue ring in the image below). "It's all rather exciting, isn't it?", burbles the autoresponder. Thrilled to the core of its little processors, it is, no doubt. So obviously very false. Harmless enough, perhaps, but I'm really not in the mood for this kind of thing right now, so it comes over irritating.
In an "oops - it could so easily happen to you" item, I'm addressed as "Dear Other Baker" (arrowed red in the image). Probably not because they have a customer called Baker already. More likely because the puldown for the title field did not have the choice of "Dr". (I applied for a credit card when I'd recently got my PhD, put "Dr" onthe form thinking that might help, and am stuck with it now...) A bit surprising perhaps that the Title pulldown does not accommodate "Dr", but it's not a design failure: the "Other" value in that title pulldown opens up a field in which unanticipated titles can be entered. There are of course very many possible titles that humans adopt (Brigadeer, Captain, Princess, Guru...), and some people are very particular about being allowed to use the correct title. So a free text field is arguably better than some humungous pulldown of all known options: if you truly wish to be addressed as "Jedi Master" on the delivery label of your goods, then the free text field can accommodate your wish. So the design is sensible, but it looks like something went wrong in populating the field from the value I gave.
Alternatively the company thinks I am one of the Others, a race of creatures from the "Song of Fire and Ice" fantasy series by George R R Martin (appeared on TV as "Game of Thrones". But this seems unlikely, as I have never knowingly killed anyone with a crystal sword and then magically re-animated them as zombie servants.
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