I don’t know about you but I am no good at all at complaining at least not in person. Being British means that it is generally better to be polite and unhappy than complain and be happy or even more worryingly, be perceived by everyone else to be a complainer.
I don’t think I’ve ever complained in person about anything. Mostly its because 99% of times there is nothing to complain about and even if there is a legitimate complaint well I kind of expect things to go wrong. That being said, I have always been an awesome complainer by letter. The chance to make a valid argument bit by bit without any interruptions or worries about not going too far or indeed not going far enough with the complaint is something I have always thought is an art-form.
Though I don’t set out to with any end-goal in mind it is amazing the results I’ve had. The first time I remember was when I was 16 and a bus driver wouldn’t accept my fare because it was in small change so I was left in the snow one morning. I wrote and complained and put them to shame. I got a refund, compensation, a letter of apology and most satisfyingly the bus driver was fired from his job. This might sound harsh but he was always a bad person to be public facing, angry, miserable and rude.
I’ve written to companies and organisations mostly and always get a much better response than if I just complained in person. At work, I was well-known for writing funny but devastating complaints to management overseas about various issues. Weeks later people would come round to me and whisper… “shhh could you forward me that email you wrote about such and such”.
However, none of mine quite match the letter of complaint below if only because I never sent mine to the Daily Telegraph newspaper. We’ve all had bad experiences when travelling, heck I wrote a book on mine (shameless plug alert Planes, Trains and Sinking Boats) but the letter below is something special. I always think that using humour can be much more effective than being threatening of confrontational but the letter below is something special. Stuck on a flight from Mumbai to London, the least you might expect is a slightly dodgy meal with plastic cutlery that isn’t sharp enough to cut butter but Oliver Beale suffered more than most and took it like a man!
Dear Mr Branson
REF: Mumbai to Heathrow 7th December 2008
I love the Virgin brand, I really do which is why I continue to use it despite a series of unfortunate incidents over the last few years. This latest incident takes the biscuit.
Ironically, by the end of the flight I would have gladly paid over a thousand rupees for a single biscuit following the culinary journey of hell I was subjected to at the hands of your corporation.
Look at this Richard. Just look at it:
I imagine the same questions are racing through your brilliant mind as were racing through mine on that fateful day. What is this? Why have I been given it? What have I done to deserve this? And, which one is the starter, which one is the desert?
You don’t get to a position like yours Richard with anything less than a generous sprinkling of observational power so I KNOW you will have spotted the tomato next to the two yellow shafts of sponge on the left. Yes, it’s next to the sponge shaft without the green paste. That’s got to be the clue hasn’t it. No sane person would serve a desert with a tomato would they. Well answer me this Richard, what sort of animal would serve a desert with peas in:
I know it looks like a bhaji but it’s in custard Richard, custard. It must be the pudding. Well you’ll be fascinated to hear that it wasn’t custard. It was a sour gel with a clear oil on top. It’s only redeeming feature was that it managed to be so alien to my palette that it took away the taste of the curry emanating from our miscellaneous central cuboid of beige matter. Perhaps the meal on the left might be the desert after all.
Anyway, this is all irrelevant at the moment. I was raised strictly but neatly by my parents and if they knew I had started desert before the main course, a sponge shaft would be the least of my worries. So lets peel back the tin-foil on the main dish and see what’s on offer.
I’ll try and explain how this felt. Imagine being a twelve year old boy Richard. Now imagine it’s Christmas morning and you’re sat their with your final present to open. It’s a big one, and you know what it is. It’s that Goodmans stereo you picked out the catalogue and wrote to Santa about.
Only you open the present and it’s not in there. It’s your hamster Richard. It’s your hamster in the box and it’s not breathing. That’s how I felt when I peeled back the foil and saw this:
Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s more of that Bhaji custard. I admit I thought the same too, but no. It’s mustard Richard. MUSTARD. More mustard than any man could consume in a month. On the left we have a piece of broccoli and some peppers in a brown glue-like oil and on the right the chef had prepared some mashed potato. The potato masher had obviously broken and so it was decided the next best thing would be to pass the potatoes through the digestive tract of a bird.
Once it was regurgitated it was clearly then blended and mixed with a bit of mustard. Everybody likes a bit of mustard Richard.
By now I was actually starting to feel a little hypoglycaemic. I needed a sugar hit. Luckily there was a small cookie provided. It had caught my eye earlier due to it’s baffling presentation:
It appears to be in an evidence bag from the scene of a crime. A CRIME AGAINST BLOODY COOKING. Either that or some sort of back-street underground cookie, purchased off a gun-toting maniac high on his own supply of yeast. You certainly wouldn’t want to be caught carrying one of these through customs. Imagine biting into a piece of brass Richard. That would be softer on the teeth than the specimen above.
I was exhausted. All I wanted to do was relax but obviously I had to sit with that mess in front of me for half an hour. I swear the sponge shafts moved at one point.
Once cleared, I decided to relax with a bit of your world-famous on-board entertainment. I switched it on:
I apologise for the quality of the photo, it’s just it was incredibly hard to capture Boris Johnson’s face through the flickering white lines running up and down the screen. Perhaps it would be better on another channel:
Is that Ray Liotta? A question I found myself asking over and over again throughout the gruelling half-hour I attempted to watch the film like this. After that I switched off. I’d had enough. I was the hungriest I’d been in my adult life and I had a splitting headache from squinting at a crackling screen.
My only option was to simply stare at the seat in front and wait for either food, or sleep. Neither came for an incredibly long time. But when it did it surpassed my wildest expectations:
Yes! It’s another crime-scene cookie. Only this time you dunk it in the white stuff.
Richard…. What is that white stuff? It looked like it was going to be yoghurt. It finally dawned on me what it was after staring at it. It was a mixture between the Bhaji custard and the Mustard sauce. It reminded me of my first week at university. I had overheard that you could make a drink by mixing vodka and refreshers. I lied to my new friends and told them I’d done it loads of times. When I attempted to make the drink in a big bowl it formed a cheese Richard, a cheese. That cheese looked a lot like your bhaji-mustard.
So that was that Richard. I didn’t eat a bloody thing. My only question is: How can you live like this? I can’t imagine what dinner round your house is like, it must be like something out of a nature documentary.
As I said at the start I love your brand, I really do. It’s just a shame such a simple thing could bring it crashing to it’s knees and begging for sustenance.
Yours Sincerely,
Oliver Beale
It’s rumoured that Sir Richard Branson offered Oliver Beale a job solely on the strength of this letter which Branson apparently enjoyed immensely despite its critique of the award-winning food of Virgin Airlines. It has also been said by rivals that the whole letter is a clever marketing device though everyone in involved denies this.
I have read this letter dozens of times over the years and each time it makes me laugh so I hope if you haven’t seen this before that you enjoy it as much as I have. If you enjoyed this post you might like my book 101 Most Horrible Tortures in History which has a tongue in cheek take on punishments and tortures and available in paperback as well as through Amazon, iBooks/iTunes and Kobo worldwide.
Stephen Liddell 
Hilarious! I love a good complaints letter and this one is by far one of the funniest I have seen!
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It is, isn’t it. I would have loved to be sat next to him on that flight!
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I like a good complaint letter, and have achieved a few results although not an offer to work for Virgin, but that one didn’t do it for me. Over-egged the pudding comes to mind. I’ve been on the other side too, managing complaints, and wished I could have helped people write some of their complaint letters!
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He certainly put his heart and soul into that one.
It is annoying when you get people who complain to you or your company and they just haven’t got a clue or ven worse got their facts wrong. I just want to tell them that even they had a valid complaint, no-one is going to listen to you when you write like that!!!
Thanks for commenting!
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love it
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Brilliant. I’ve only written one letter of complaint. To Channel 4. They took my favourite show off. I got a reply. Certainly computer generated. Waste of time. I contemplated a one-man protest outside their offices but I decided against that in the end.
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I think if people complained more, some things might be better. I always admire the French who often seem to bring the county to a halt over minor matters.
It’s always disheartening to receive automatic replies, it feels like being fobbed off.
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Stephen, I have a Stephen (son) who flies constantly…from USA to Europe to Australia and back again several times a month. I knew he would so enjoy this letter because it probably says much of what he has seen and experienced over the thousands of miles in the air…with no where to go, but sit and take it! I personally laughed until I cried. Whatever this man does for a living…writing should definitely be one of the options. Nancy at Boyer Writes.
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Hi Nancy, I bet your son will really appreciate this mans predicament. I laughed so much too when I read it and every few months I look it up and laugh all over again.
I am sure he must be a very talented individual, no wonder Richard Brason thought it was funny and gave him a call.
Thanks for commenting!
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What a great blog and what a great letter! Thanks!
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Thanks so much, I’m really glad you are enjoying it. Have a lovely day in all that snow you have there.
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Thanks Stephen! Even more snow today! Will this winter ever end? No, I can’t think about that yet – it is only February!
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For us it’s been floods for months on end!
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I am not sure which is worse – rain or snow. I think rain so wish for you that the rain stops soon!
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I laughed till I cried. Thanks for sharing that one, Stephen. Rosemarie
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Thanks Rosemarie, me too!
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Very funny letter- and the photos make the point! I thought airplane food had gotten better over the years! At least if you fly Air France..
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We’d always heard that airplane food was the absolute worst possible attempt at meals. This most definitely takes that point & rams it home!! lmao~ I wonder, what Richard looked like when he viewed the pictures? Perhaps cringing from the sight of this gelatinous mess? As for Inion & I, we would’ve had to jump on this as it is entirely too juicy to pass up! Perhaps find a way to prank the stewardess who served me. Or maybe, send the food to Richard via fed-ex. But, instead of a “complaint letter” a bogus letter in the form of a threat from the Center for Disease Control & a frightening, fictitious disease that goes by the name of: Clabberdiaphrosis, jelloascutioitis, pubenarygeneflactuary. Along with that, a registered complaint warranting the CDC’s involvement immediately if restitution is not made within 48 hours. Ah yes…the possibilities. lmao~ Love this post so much we are sharing now!!! As for us we’re headed off to the kitchen to see if we can scurry up some regurgitated mashie’s topped with a putrid mustard sauce. And for dessert, why nothing but Virgin’s Best~ An aged cookie with custard surprise!!! 😀
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Thanks so much for your comment, sorry for the late reply, I missed it while on my travels 🙂 I bet Richard would have been both horrified and hugely amused. My experience of airplane food wasn’t that bad and on the one time it was ok, the cutlery was too blunt to eat it properly!
I think your suggestion is great. I might be tempted to pretend it was an alien creature that came to life or yes prank the stewardess and pretend you found it in the toilet.
I’m not sure you’ll be quite good or bad enough to repeat that meal in your kitchen but if you do, please don’t ask me round to taste it 🙂
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This is hilarious! It reminds me of an experience in a hospital. I was checked in late one afternoon for emergency surgery to follow the next day. I was told I needed to order a dinner. Since I am a vegetarian I assumed I would be served steamed veggies and rice. To my horror one of the dietary staff brought in a squished peanut butter and jelly sandwich in a baggie! It looked like it had sat in someone’s locker for quite a while. I refused to touch it .When the nurse came in and saw it, her eyes widened and she gasped, “We don’t serve food in baggies!”. I wish I would have taken a picture of it. I would have sent it off to the hospital administrators and asked if this is what they served the doctors before performing heart surgery.
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That sounds a terrible thing to happen and enough to make people feel ill. I hope your operation was a success and your are much better now.
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To quote the old man from Monty Python, “I’m getting better”.
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Hilarious. The quality of food served on the flights have nose dived in recent years. On most occasions we have to carry the food with us. I share the experience about pathetic food but the dexterity of complainant makes us ROFL.
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We bring our own food too. Yes, the complainant expresses his feelings better than we ever could!
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Truly hilarious Stephen. Once on flight from Khartoum to Cairo, I was served lamb and water – nothing else, just lamb and water. ~James
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I have always wanted to visit Khartoum but so far have only reached Lake Nasser. Lamb and water sounds very bizarre even for Sudan and Egypt!
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I remember this from the first time around on BBC news at Ten in awe, a Virgin ad shown on the beeb. This letter still has me crying with laughter, got my 11 yr old to read today who was too young last time around. Brilliant !!
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I agree, it’s just fantastic. It doesn’t matter how many times I read it or how long since I last read it, I find it the funniest thing each and every time. I remember it too when it first came out maybe 6 or 7 years ago. Thanks for commenting Nic!
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Hello, thank you for the ”like” on my blog. I’ve complained many times usually by phone or email and I did get positive results. Anyhow, I’d like to know about your novels. Take care.
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Fun lettet to read. I must say that although totally English. I must have something in my background as I have no bother complaining in person. Sometimes you have to stand your ground. However, the letter in question was so involved that in oersin would not have cut it.
Evelyn
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Thanks for sharing this! Lots of laughs here!
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It’s a blog post that keeps giving. I read it every 6 months or so and it always makes me laugh too. I’m glad you enjoyed it 🙂
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I’ve been on a flight like that, although I must state not a Virgin flight. It happened many years ago on a flight to Majorca from East Midlands Airport, if I remember correctly it was a Spanish airline their idea of an in flight meal was a past its best cookie and a small bottle of orange juice, it wasn’t supposed to be an economy flight ???
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Virgin media I have been with virgin media for 15 years I pay 95 pounds a month I asked them to.extened my tv cable 8 feet thay want it to charge. Me 99 pounds I done it my self for £4.99 I think I’ll check out sky
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