Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmichaud | Hacker News Reader

I've seen worse apologies, but the weaselly wording still leaves a bad taste in my mouth:

He learned of "the challenges" fabulis faced.

He apologizes for the "confusion about the status" of the account.

He regrets the "unintended message" that his employees "may have" conveyed.

That's weaselly. I know he has to cover the company's ass, but the fact is that the "challenge" was that one or more citi employees are homophobic shits who should be removed from a position that gives them this sort of authority now that they've demonstrated their lack of good judgment in this area.

View on HN

I understand your anger, but this is a good, well-written apology, albeit done in a formal style. Fabulis may or may not accept it, but it's hardly like Citi's blowing them off.

Bill Brown (the Citibank manager) made pretty strong statements like "I assure you that Citi is committed to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities". There's not a lot of wiggle room there.

As a piece of corporate communications, it's nicely done. He openly addressed all of the customer's concerns, without immediately throwing one of his employees under the bus or being defensive. That's a delicate dance.

> He openly addressed all of the customer's concerns, without immediately throwing one of his employees under the bus or being defensive. That's a delicate dance.

Yes, that's a delicate dance, but it assumes that not throwing an employee under the bus is appropriate.

If an employee does something wrong, throwing them under the bus may, or may not, be appropriate. Citi has made its decision, but that decision doesn't bind us. We're free to use that decision to judge Citi.

Citi is within its rights to make sure that we don't know what it did about this employee. However, that secrecy means we're free to assume what we'd like about what they did, or didn't, do.

To be fair, this is common business writing. I don't think people realize they are being so indirect because being direct sounds crass and impolite. It takes a good writer to clearly document a situation and properly apologize; most business people are just not good writers.

So I would chalk this up to ignorance, not malice. It's clear that Citi is upset that they treated a customer this way, and that they want to indicate this to their client. That's all I would ask for.

I would be motivated to keep my business with Citi, if only because I now have a higher-level contact in case the underlings mess something up again. I think it's clear that this guy cares... but maybe I am too nice.

Yeah, in particular, Citi made it very unclear if "the challenges" Fabulis faced were in fact related to its blog postings, and what Citi's policy on that is. Was that merely a misunderstanding and the account was suspended for reasons unrelated to a blog? Was it suspended due to the blog but by an employee not acting in line with Citi policy? Or was there a Citi policy on that, and if so, has it been changed?

It seems to have worked out for Fabulis (due in no small part, I expect, to the publicity), but they haven't given enough information for me to be confident that the root problem was solved.

I agree, this reminds me of just how good WordPress' apology was recently when they had downtime:

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/wp-com-downtime-summ...

Now there's some non-weasely, honest-to-goodness apologisin'.

Vagueness could result from the writer of the apology not knowing the exact details of who did what or not being able to discuss the details. (Example: internal investigation and company rules don't allow discussion)

Alternately, weasel words could simply be the language this guy speaks all day and didn't think to be more clear. (Not to excuse the weaseliness.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com