First thing I thought of when I read this
"We apologize for the incident and any inconvenience it may have caused. Rest assured, you can continue to use your AT&T 3G service on your iPad with confidence."<p>is this from 37 Signals:<p>------------------------------------<p>“We apologize”<p>You say “I apologize” to someone when you bump into them on the subway, not if you spill your coffee all over them. Then you’re “really, really sorry!”. If your service is important to your users, it’s a lot more like spilling coffee all over them than it is like bumping into them when you go down.<p>Also, you should find someone willing to take personal responsibility. Even if it’s not directly their fault. There’s always someone who’s in charge, someone who stops the buck. Hiding behind a faceless “we” is weak.<p>“Any inconvenience”<p>First of all, if I depend on a service and can’t get to it, it’s not an inconvenience. It might bloody very well be a full-on crisis. An inconvenience is when I can’t get my flavor of milkshake at Potbelly’s or if there’s line at the grocery store. This ain’t that.<p>Using the word “any” makes it even worse. It’s implying that you don’t really care what bucket my frustrations fit in. Every feeling I have about this will apparently fit the “inconvenience” header. Wrong.<p>“This may have caused”<p>Again, this is slighting the very real experience that I am actually having right now. If this didn’t affect me, you don’t really need to say you’re sorry. If it did affect me, it didn’t “may have caused”. It caused! Stop wavering.<p>------------------------------------<p><a href="http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1528-the-bullshit-of-outage-language" rel="nofollow">http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1528-the-bullshit-of-outage-l...</a>