Disclaimer: I’m fully aware of the hypocrisy of posting a rant about poor spelling and grammar on a website that is full of articles with stupid grammatical slips. Most of them are typos that I never had the chance to sub out, and one day I’ll track them all down and will sleep peacefully at night.
I currently have the pleasure of being a tenant in a large block of riverside flats. Nice as it would be to actually own the four walls I reside within, I’m often glad I don’t, thanks to the howls of outrage that are frequently directed on the residents’ messageboard towards the management company. For reasons best known to themselves they are called Peverel OM and are a giant behemoth of a facilities company, proudly boasting of owning leases and managing everything from small developments to huge office buildings. According to those who have to pay them directly for service charges they are also unresponsive, unaccountable and about as popular as the people in Flat 49 who held another scre aming contest on their balcony at 1am on Sunday morning.
My only contact with them as a tenant is through the occasional circular notice that is distributed to all the post boxes, normally to advise us of some issue they have noticed or behaviour they wish to correct. The one they sent the other week was I’m sure well meant, but somehow managed to undermine any remaining belief in their professionalism possessed by anyone who received it.
I’ll show you a few examples. This letter was posted to all the residents individually on their own headed notepaper and signed off by the lady who has the title of “Property Manager – Customer Services department”.
It begins:
A good start, and possibly one which suggests their IT department need to check that spellcheckers are activated correctly on the office computers. Or alternatively they just need to educate the people typing letters what the wiggly red lines under words mean.
Then the first paragraph:
No spell-check failures here. Just a grammatical one. The large items of furniture are plural, so really they ARE being dumped in the bin stores. Naturally this could just be a leftover from an earlier draft of the letter which referred to a single item of large furniture but I doubt it. With just one line the entire credibility of the communication has been undermined. Instead of being reminded of our responsibilities as residents and instructed to adjust our behaviour, we appear instead to be being lectured by someone with poor standards of education. I would hope our property manager isn’t someone who failed their English GCSE, but perception is everything, especially where business communication is concerned.
The rest of the letter makes it through relatively unscathed, until the footnote just below the signature:
That’s right. Their exciting new interactive website is not available. Which does beg the question why they are telling us about it anyway. Unless of course this is a typo or a slip of the mind (of which we are all occasionally guilty) and the sentence was supposed to explain to us that it is NOW available. If that is the case then it is desperately unfortunate that the error managed to stand the entire meaning of the sentence on its head. I can sympathise however, having many times in the past merrily composed pieces about the latest releases of Blue when I actually meant Blur, and vice-versa.
Finally, such wholesale mangling of the English language is by no means confined to residential circulars. Take this temporary sign, currently posted up just outside Southwark tube station on the South Bank.
It is actually a little hard to read, and I may take a slightly better resolution one later today. The sign reads:
ADVANCE NOTICE
THE BRITISH 10K LONDON RUN SUN 12 JULY. CLOSURE’S THE WEST END & THE CITY.
1 comments:
Peverel are fuckers. They owned the building that my late mother's retirement flat was in. When first explaining to the warden that my mother was wheelchair-bound (before she moved in), her first comment was concern that my mother might chip the new paintwork in the corridors, rather than reassuring me that she would earn the service charge by keeping an extra careful eye on my mum. Unfortunately, my mum was there for less than a month before contracting a fatal case of peritionitis, and so I was saddled with paying service charge and ground rent for a flat that I couldn't even use, until I could sell it. Even when the sale was going through, the greedy cunts insisted on a £25 'admin charge' for answering solicitors' questions. Money-grabbing cunts; the warden also only worked weekdays 9-4, with the 'careline' covering the residents the rest of the time. Even then, the cheeky cow insisted on having 'quiet days' where the residents couldn't bother her, despite that being her JOB.
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