Angry vendor syndrome

At the top of my list of New Year’s Resolutions is to NOT be this guy. Names have been changed to protect the guilty and (…) added to reduce the length.

Dear Editor Xxx

We are a vendor to some of your competitors… When I finally reached Editor Zzzz today, he hung up the phone on me immediately after I asked him to spend 60 seconds to see what we provide…

We talk to many newspapers… when we get replies like the one I received from Zzzz, it is usually a sign that the paper is either going out of business… (or the employee)… just doesnt care about the paper.

We would like to show you our product, and I want to know if we can do that by somehow avoiding Zzzz.

So hypothetically, if a vendor were to call you on New Year’s Eve, during a blizzard when there are three people left in the newsroom and try to sell you a product you do not want, how receptive might you be? Hypothetically just receptive enough to be polite, and then increasingly less so as they decline to take ‘no’ for an answer. And then, much, much less so after they immediately send the above email to your boss.

Happy New Year!