Anthony Matthews is something of a master of the customer complaint. He's sent detailed, humorous letters to car companies, hotels and airlines — with successful results. He posts his carefully composed missives and the companies' responses at his website, Dear Customer Relations, which is also his characteristic opening line.
The letter that started it all was written on a typewriter 25 years ago.
"Just imagine it! It's January 1989 and you've just purchased a gleaming ex-demonstration Rover 820e with only 3,000 miles on the clock," Matthews writes.
The car had a multitude of troubles, explained in paragraph after paragraph, but the letter hits its climax when Matthews writes about how his heater was on full blast in the middle of the summer, and he couldn't shut it off. He had to roll down his windows to keep cool — but then he drove right through a downpour. When he went to roll up his windows, they didn't go up.
"There you are, cruising along the motorway. Your left side, in the full blast of the heater, is slowly cooking to a perfect medium-rare," he writes. "Your right side is immersed in a torrent of cold water hitting you at 70 miles per hour. The car is slowly filling with water. Your sauna is turning into a paddling pool."
The letter was a smashing success, Matthews tells NPR's Eric Westervelt. "They took the car away for a whole month and they basically rebuilt it from the chassis upwards, "he says. "And that was the start of it all."
A more recent letter concerned a noisy milkman named Barry. "He'd been ruining our sleep for many years," Matthews says, by noisily delivering milk in the middle of the night. So Matthews wrote a letter to the milkman's boss, which read in part:
"He enters the cul-de-sac in first gear with foot to the floor, brakes abruptly, jumps out to make his delivery and then reverses back the way he came with the needle on his rev counter well into the red zone before a quick handbrake turn then back to first gear before screaming off down the street to wake up other people. Barry evidently has yet to discover second, third and fourth gears. He may as well deliver the milk in a Harrier Jump Jet."