A few months ago Fortune Magazine mailed me one of those rare Don Corleone offers: 3 years for $20. I don’t even read the darned thing and I responded like Meg Ryan in Katz’s: Yes! Yes! Yes!
Today I got an astonishing email from Fortune. Here’s the start of it:

Dear MY FULL NAME WAS HERE,

I’m the Vice President of customer service for FORTUNE magazine and wanted to personally invite you to explore our online customer service site. There you can manage your subscription 24 hours a day – 7 days a week. By managing your subscription online, we will send you less correspondence through the regular mail so you can help do your part to reduce carbon emissions. So Go Green and sign in today.

Be still my heart. Imagine being able to manage my subscription 24/7! How did I ever get along without managing my goddamn subscription? Oh, to have all the years back, the sad, empty years with dozens of subscriptions unmanaged at all, never mind all day every day.

I’m so filled with joy that I forgive the jumbling of tenses in the first sentence along with the awkward construction, the superfluity of words and the third sentence making mincemeat of the notion that commercial communication should make some kind of rudimentary sense; who, exactly, is managing my subscription here, me or some mysterious “we”?

What makes Fortune think I have any interest at all in reducing carbon emissions? Are they under the impression that I’m a high school sophomore? So Go Green? Is Fortune run by insane people?

There’s a bunch of other stuff (mostly all the fun I can have managing my subscription) then this close:

Thanks for being a loyal FORTUNE magazine subscriber.
Loyal? I just started. I think I got one issue so far. Perhaps tyro was the intended word.

Pat Keller

Vice President, Customer Service

TIME INC is a leader in sustainability. Learn more about Time Inc’s role in the environment by clicking here or copy and paste this link into your browser: http://timeinc.com/community/sustainability.php

Don’t forget to do your part and recycle your FORTUNE Magazine after you’re done with it.

This is just too frigging precious. Sustainability? Of what? Keeping a simple train of thought on track for longer than 5 seconds? Employing people with careers longer than three months? I don’t think so.

Learn more about Time Inc’s role in the environment? I already know what it is: Time Inc’s role in the environment, other than parroting Gore’s drivel, is precisely the same as a grain of sand’s role in a beach.

Clearly something is very wrong on Sixth Avenue.

Print may be moribund and maybe it’s because of the Internet. But maybe, just maybe, it’s because the people who run it seem to go out of their way to piss at least half of their readers off.

I subscribed to Fortune, not The Utne Reader.

It’s all sites that sell stuff but today’s example is Franklin Covey. I have 0 interest in anything they sell but every year I order Daily Planners for a friend. And every year, I just try to place the damned order but I can’t because I have no idea what my password is. So I click on the Forgot your Password? line and they email me a complicated temporary password (this year it had one of these ~ in it) that I then have to enter somewhere else so I can change the password to something else, which I do.
When I finally get back to trying to buy something, I make a serious mistake – I start over. Then when I get to Checkout, I see I have two of whatever I wanted. I look around for a way to knock it down to just one. Hmmm. To hell with it. Abandon ship!
If it was just me, I‘d give up forever. But I said I’d get this Planner thing for a friend so I have to go back. I wait 24 hours. Luckily, Franklin Covey had forgotten all about my abandoned cart so I can start over from scratch. Even more luckily, I remember my new password. Took me 20 seconds and bingo.
I wish there was a way I could get treated online like a completely new customer. I’d happily type in my name, address and credit card info if I could just be on my way quickly.
As near as I can figure, I get no benefit from being a regular customer and Franklin Covey doesn’t need my password in order to give me anything. They just need it to connect my sales history and what do I care?