Definition:
gobbledegook: Babbling incoherently, making no sense, Being completely random.
The usability of the portal “designed” to administer EU research projects is a desaster. But wait till you are finally unable to figure out what is going on and forced to contact the helpdesk. You are presented with a form to fill in a description of the problem. After you have done so you receive a letter asking for you ID on the system – as if this could not be included in the form. This is what I got after providing the missing piece of information:
Hello,
We received so many emails daily and we base our resolution based on your info provided.
Please reply to the original email you sent us with this info so I can further analyze the issue.
The first sentence is just sloppy language: past instead of present time, confusing iteration of terms (“base”). “Resolution” of what? But the second sentence is an extraordinary show of confusion.
The customer has sent a mail to enquire about a problem. He is now asked to reply to this original mail, as if he were not only the sender, but also the recipient. Given that I reply to myself, how can another person analyze the issue?
Am I being too hard on the poor fellow on the other end of the line, or should one, in administering a research project that pays out the amount of 2 million EURO, be entitled to expect basic logic from the IT support?
At least you do not hang for 30 minutes in the waiting loop to receive a “I am not responsible, please call xyz…” afterwards (like me). 🙂
Here is my optimistic guess of what happened here:
1. You filled out a form to describe your issue.
2. You probably received a notification mail with the content of the form + an instruction to provide your system ID.
3. Instead of clicking on the “reply” button in your e-mail client when viewing the notification mail, you started from scratch with a blank mail.
4. The person from IT support (maybe outsourced and thus writing from India and after a 12 hour working day) receives only your system ID but not the content and probably has no proper way of matching the ID and your original request.
If this is the case, the bottom line would be: “Reply to your original e-mail” could be a shortcut for: “Reply to the notification mail which contains your original message and the instruction to send your system ID, so that we have the whole history of your message, and most important, your original issue.”
What a felicitous example for the principle of charity in action! And it is a demonstration that its importance does not lie in just “being friendly”. Because Andreas’s analysis brings out a procedural system I was not aware of. So I actually profit by someone explaining how this is supposed to work, i.e. the logic behind the strange appearance.
Nice try, but the explanation still does not fit 🙂
Yes, I received a notification mail, but no instruction to provide the system ID:
Rather than a system notification I got this personal mail:
To which I replied:
Here I included the copy of my query, cited above, just as Andreas would have advised me to do. And this is the happy ending:
I refrained from answering: Why didn’t you say so. And, I am sorry to say, not everything is well, because the instruction I got after this exiting exchange did not solve my problem. It treated me like a bloody newbie.
However, since a philosopher can help himself out on many occasions, I use this episode as an illustration of Wittgenstein’s understanding of philosophy in my lecture on the Big Typescript.