I Wrote a Complaint Letter and Got a Pen Pal
The customer service agent wrote back beautifully, and we never stopped.
The toaster died on a Tuesday, taking two slices of good sourdough down with it, and I responded the way any reasonable adult would: I wrote the manufacturer a two-page letter with footnotes.
I want to be clear that I did not need a new toaster. I needed somewhere to put a bad month. My lease had gone up, my cat had developed opinions about the vet, and a person I had been seeing stopped seeing me by simply becoming a read receipt. The toaster was just the first thing that broke where I could see it.
So I sat down at my kitchen table and I gave that letter everything. I described the toaster's final moments in the style of a naval tragedy. I included a eulogy for the sourdough. Footnote three simply read: "The crumbs remain at large."
I mailed it, because email felt insufficiently ceremonial, and I forgot about it... the way you forget a bottle thrown into the sea.
Eleven days later an envelope arrived from Meridian Home Appliances... and inside it was not a coupon. It was a letter, typed, one page, signed in blue ink by an R. Okafor, Customer Relations, and it opened like this: "Dear Ms. Hale. We were saddened to learn of the loss of your toaster, which, by your account, served with distinction. A replacement unit ships this week. It can never be the same toaster. We hope it will be a good one."
Then, at the bottom, below the signature, in handwriting: "P.S. Your footnote about the crumbs kept me laughing through a very long shift. Most people just yell. Thank you for making it a story instead."
I read that postscript four times standing next to my mailbox. Then I went inside and did the thing that changed the next six years of my life.
I wrote back.
What do you say to a customer relations department when your complaint has been resolved? Nothing, is the answer. There is no protocol. I wrote to R. Okafor anyway, care of Meridian Home Appliances, and reported that the replacement toaster had arrived and had big shoes to fill, and that if most people yelled, then most people were wasting an excellent postal system. I asked, because the handwriting in the postscript had a certain slant to it, whether R. wrote anything besides apologies for toasters.
The reply took three weeks... and it came from the company address, and the typed part was one polite line confirming my case was closed. Everything else was handwriting.
R. stood for Rosemary. She was sixty-one. She had worked the complaints desk for nineteen years, and yes, she wrote other things. She wrote poems on the backs of voided shipping labels during her lunch break, and she had never shown one to a living soul, and she could not explain why she was telling me this except that I was a stranger, and strangers are sometimes the only safe place to leave the truth.
Some people are only fluent on paper, and the luckiest thing that ever happened to me came postage paid.
We never switched to email.
That was never even discussed, the way you would not discuss switching a fireplace to a screensaver. Every two or three weeks, an envelope. Her paper was always cream, always slightly too formal, stolen, she eventually confessed, from the executive supply cabinet, which she considered a fair wage adjustment. My paper was whatever I had. Once, a flattened cereal box. She rated it her favorite stationery to date.
Here is what you learn about a person over six years of letters that you would never learn over sixty years of texting. Rosemary's husband had died the same spring my toaster did, which she mentioned only in her fifth letter, in a subordinate clause, the way you set down something heavy on the far end of a table. The complaints desk, she wrote, had been oddly good for her grief. All day long, people called her to say that something which was supposed to work had stopped working, and she would say, I understand, and mean it completely.
She wrote about loneliness the way a mechanic writes about engines, with no self-pity and total authority. Years later, reading through a page of poems about loneliness, I kept thinking that half of them were reaching for what Rosemary could do in a postscript.
And her poems. She started including them in the third year, one at a time, each on its voided shipping label, each labeled in the corner: "For the bin if you like."
I did not like. The woman had spent nineteen years absorbing the small furies of strangers and she had turned them into something that scanned. There was one about a man who called to complain that his late wife's kettle had failed, and how gently he said the word her, that I have never once read aloud without stopping in the middle.
I pushed, of course. I told her the world was full of pages meant for writers nobody had heard yet, and that she was the most nobody-had-heard writer I knew. She declined for two years with the elegance of a diplomat. Then... the autumn she retired, a letter arrived containing a single sentence: "All right, but you press the buttons, I refuse to learn." So with her permission I posted the kettle poem on a community wall for poets, under her name, Rosemary Okafor, age sixty-seven, first publication.
Strangers found it. Strangers left comments.
I printed every single one and mailed them to her in a fat envelope, and her reply began: "Ms. Hale. I have complaints. My heart has malfunctioned in a way not covered by the warranty. Twelve people I have never met say the kettle poem made them call their fathers."
Last spring, we finally met. Six years in, her granddaughter was graduating from a university forty minutes from my flat, and Rosemary wrote to say she would be in the area and was prepared to risk ruining everything.
I was terrified. So was she.
We had both privately theorized that we existed only on paper, that in person we would be two polite strangers standing in the wreckage of a beautiful correspondence.
We met at a cafe near the station. She was small and upright, in a coat with a brooch shaped like a wren, and for the first ten minutes we were exactly as awkward as we had feared. The talk was weather... The talk was trains. Two people fluent in ink, stammering in air.
Then Rosemary held up one finger, opened her handbag, took out a small cream notepad and a pen, wrote something, tore off the page, and slid it across the table between our two coffee cups.
It said: "This is unbearable. Write back."
So I did. We sat in that cafe for two more hours, talking easily by then, but still passing notes the whole time like schoolgirls, because some channels should never be closed. I keep her half of that afternoon folded in my wallet.
The replacement toaster, for the record, still works. Every Tuesday I make two slices of sourdough and I think, that is the best complaint I ever filed.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.