[montsnmags]

Dear [insert garden equipment company name],

You suck.

Now, now, hold on there, before you take offense at me telling you that you suck, know that I only say that you suck because you suck. In fact, you suck harder than a black hole coming off a Ramadan fast? You suck harder than Paris Hilton in a football locker room. You suck harder than "womens magazines" do at the IQ of their readership. You suck harder than the suckiest suction of the head sucker of Suck Industries, Sucksville.

See, though I bought your modular gardening equipment with the intent to use the equipment for gardening, you may say it was presumptuous of me to assume it would work for longer than 24 hours. You may say I was foolish to base any subsequent decisions on such expectations. You may say that you're not responsible for any consequences of the failure of your shitty product. You may say a lot of things but realise that as a customer all I am hearing is "We're a shitty company probably run by a bunch a feeble-minded halfwit drones with all the intelligence of a cold bowl of porridge, and our goods are manufactured from spitballs and rat-feces in a large, dirt-floored, corrugated iron shack on the outskirts of Beijing by small, feral, tick-ridden cats with head injuries" [Ed.: with all due respect to Chinese industry, since you serve all ends of the markets according to price, from those who pay handsomely and ask that you to tighten tolerances so fine that a flea's fart can't get by without you shutting down the production line and landfilling that day's results, to those like the subject garden equipment company, who ask, simply, that you affix a warning sticker to any random piece of Giger-horror-crap that tumbled off a factory-belt and that might accidentally, inadvertently, eat someone's firstborn child before collapsing the universe in on itself, and then, just, well, not working]).

This is how it goes. Firstly, on the day purchased, I used the whipper-snipper on the nature-strip. Okay, look, I know that your Marketing Department is currently foaming and quivering at my outrageous use of the probably trademarked term "whipper snipper" instead of "garden edger" or whatever the hell you called it on the box your retailer had chucked away, but it might do to remind them that, not only are the Marketing Department generally about as redundant to most companies as a laceware fringe is on a V8 engine (or, in your case, a 2-stroke, 1.5 cylinder shitbox), but that it probably behooves them to remember not to cause an intemperate reaction from their customer base, especially when the department's primary function is to arm said customers with powered devices only nominally known as "gardening equipment" (I'm very well aware that the functional usability of your tools can be measured in mere hours, but you'd be surprised how much damage can be done to (sub)human flesh in 24 hours, even if only used as a club, but even better when the modular nature allows the purchase of a chainsaw pruning attachment).

So, yes, that's right, I whipper-snipped the nature strip only of our little, piece of quarter-acre suburban "paradise" on the day purchased, and all seemed marginally okay, with only bare hints of suckiness. On the second day, however, I attached the chainsaw-pruner attachment, and, as much as it tempted me to become the new antipodean hero, The Masked Green Ninja Jedi, lopping the heads off evil-doers and people who didn't keep to the left on escalators, I instead followed the instructions precisely and used it to prune some branches. I was warned that the chain may initially loosen after as little as five attempts at pruning, and that the requisite adjustment could easily be made via a small screw. However, you failed to warn me (as you most assuredly would have known, since I'm sure failure is not only an option for you, but about the only guarantee you offer), that the motor would simply stop working - making all the loud and revolutionary noises (similar to the revolutionary noises of the hordes of dissatisfied customers currently "pruning" their way through your security gates), but spinning the chain (and the eventually reattached whipper-snipper) at a speed unlikely to cut through the soggy, translucent, crap-inked, tissue paper you call a warranty.

Now, one would think that returning it to the store where it was purchased would result in refund or replacement, but such satisfaction from your retailer was not to be obtained. For our 24 hour use of your gardening bludgeon (so-called, since that was now its only possible use), we would have to wait about three weeks while it went to some "approved agent" for examination. Seeing as I arrogantly consider my intelligence to be slightly higher than the cold bowls of porridge employed by your Subhuman Resources department, I am now quite willing to make the fairly reasonable assumption that your "approved agent" is some local bloke with a shed out the back of his house stocked with a bench and some tools (probably manual tools, though if powered, probably not yours if he wanted to avoid returning them to himself for service each day). This particular "approved agent" is apparently "backed up from Christmas" (oh, how could anyone possibly be surprised?), and we're advised it may take three weeks to determine that your tools suck (it pays to be wary of statistics, I know, but "90% failure" is fairly indicative of some kind of a problem, yes?). So, naturally it has now been more than three weeks, and considering that after a week-and-a-bit we were advised by your retailer (who by coincidence seem to have their company's name inspired from your corporate motto, "Well, our stuff might, err, work, 10% of the time", and who seem to have taken their inspiration for service from a largely immobile pile of sweet-smelling, rotting, vegetable compost) that they'd only sent it off on the Wednesday, I am guessing that your "approved agent" has hung himself with some "garden edger" cable, leaving a note that simply says "wHip mE! CHAIN me! thA BuGs! tHA buGs! kILL IT! BrEAK iT!" and that I'm unlikely to receive either recompense for the loss of my little-used purchase, nor receive a replacement, prior to the heat-death of the universe or its sudden implosion (which, as previously mentioned, could happen any day now depending on how many people have purchased one of your products, like me completely unaware of that potential risk).

As such, I simply ask out of incredulous curiosity, if you recognise the disparity of pressure between the highly charged reality of your customers' dissatisfaction, and the near-vacuum of substance in your inappropriately-named "Quality Control" centre? Perhaps such a disparity may be the root cause of the apparent whirlwind of suction surrounding and converging on your [irony alert!] operation...well, that and the random implosions occuring in stock-control? Who is to know? Alas, unlikely you, since your inability to recognise that your customers will ensure that your name becomes synonymous with crap, rubbish, uselessness, failure, Will Ferrell movies, and device-faults-that-inspire-violent-rage-in-their-users, probably precludes the possibility of such self-aware lucidity of thought, any more than the possibility of your recognition that you've just soiled yourself.

Yours, resisting your suckiness,
An enraged and bitter ex-customer with access to other "gardening equipment" and not afraid to use it.