BT has been a bit serious of late so I hope you don’t mind if I offer this bit of light-hearted fluff.

I recently had cause to complain about the service I had received from a local organisation. Their response included the following italicised sentence:

Considering the reasons for the failure in communication I can inform you that my investigations have identified that the matter was not handled effectively because of procedural and staff failures which have been addressed by a combination of improvements to internal processes and modifications to lines of communication.

It’s some time since I retired so I’m not really up to speed with current management jargon, but my attempt to translate the above goes along the lines of:

We didn’t do what we should have done because of useless staff and lousy management but we’ve now sent out a memo about it.

but I’d be very interested in any alternative suggestions.

Obviously it would be totally unfair of me to identify the organisation concerned, but I will say that it is Beeston based and shares its initials with a national broadcasting concern funded from the public purse.

The letter was dated 9^th December 2011 which was, ironically, National Plain English Day and coincided with the Plain English Campaign’s annual 2011 Golden Bull awards.  Have we got a contender for 2012?