Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

What jumps out at me after reading this notice is how it completely lacks any apology. I am not prescribing what it should say but merely observing that having lived in North America for sometime now, it seems hard for me to imagine for such a notice to not sound profusely apologetic here.

Note: I do not consider words like 'unfortunately' and 'extremely unpleasant' apologetic. Also, I understand there are cultural differences between the Netherlands and the USA- no joke.



This is very consistent with customer service in The Netherlands - nothing is ever the fault of service providers, and you manage to convince them otherwise - you'll get nothing more than "unfortunately (...) not possible"


Customer service is done by another comapny. Source: It's me this time, NS customers service errrr....We help, it's called Webhelp.


I don't mind the tone, I got tired of US style politically correctness just for the sake of saying it.

How would "We are trully sorry for this incident" make it any better ?

I do mind the fact that they don't pay the people their money back if they try to find alternatives to get to their destination. That's 100% unacceptable.


When is being apologetic became politically correctness? Are we soon going to call every decent human like behavior in public space as being politically correct?


> When is being apologetic became politically correctness?

When it became insincere or boarderline fradulent.

"We deeply regret this one incident" - you regret getting caught and it has happened many times before and will happen many times again.

"We are sorry, we have learnt the lessons and it will never happen again" - no you havent and yes it will.

"Thank you so much this is delicious" - umm try tasting the food before lavishing your praise.

5* uber ratings for everything - need I say anymore?


Exactly this.

Actions are more important than words, otherwise it's just political fluff.

Again they should have refunded people, not care about their language, they didn't so that's a big no-no.

Every company is saying 'sorry', every politician is saying 'sorry' but there are no actual follow ups and ways of fixing it.


The cynicism runs deep. Did you know that cynicism is linked to depression?

"The study was conducted on a group of 3,399 individuals, all from London and aged between 35 and 55. The personality traits that were observed included cynicism, suspicion, resentment and distrust. After the study period was completed, it was found that the majority of individuals who expressed these particular personality traits that were monitored at the start of the study had developed depression during the 19 year-period."

https://www.bphope.com/blog/how-cynicism-is-linked-to-depres...


> from London and aged between 35 and 55

Check and check.

> cynicism, suspicion, resentment and distrust

Its london - if you are not suspicious and distrusting your phone will be removed from your possession as a you walk down the street. Resentment - from the council estates to mayfair.

Cynical, I would say I am 100%, however, as per your article Being cynical essentially means you are unable to trust the intensions of those around you. I trust their intentions, I dont trust what they say their intentions are.

The intention of the politician (or child) who gets caught lying is not to appologise and make amends, its to get out of trouble. The intention of the diner who says this is delicious before tasting a dish is to ingratiate themselves to the host or appear the "polite one" at the dinner party - otherwise they would find out how the food actually tasted before claiming it is the finest they have ever tasted.

As for the 5* uber rating - The bottom line is if you give your driver less than 5 stars, you have screwed him over. So, unless they fuck up, give 5 stars.

Take care not to slide so far to the other side where there is another trait - toxic positivity ... With toxic positivity, negative emotions are seen as inherently bad. Instead, positivity and happiness are compulsively pushed, and authentic human emotional experiences are denied, minimized, or invalidated.


> The bottom line is if you give your driver less than 5 stars, you have screwed him over

The bottom line is that the system is messed up, isn’t it? Same with performance reviews at big co. Why have reviews at all if it’s only useful as a weapon.


> I do mind the fact that they don't pay the people their money back if they try to find alternatives to get to their destination.

Is there any reason to assume that this is a fact? Usually in these situations, NS is pretty good about paying people back.


Why would they be sorry? They’re the ones who are missing millions? of Euros in revenue due to this issue while the passengers just had to take a bus or bike somewhere. They probably would tell you that if you had to bike, it’s healthier that way. A little bit of rain won’t make you melt.

/s


"Due to the enormous impact of the failure in the IT system, it is unfortunately not possible to run any trains today." I think the writer is more pointing the finger at IT than feeling apologetic. Imagine getting called an enormous failure by your adjacent department, that writer wants you to know who screwed up instead of apologize for their screw up. Seems more useful than an apology in my opinion.


Customer service is done by another comapny. Source: It's me this time, NS customers service errrr....We help, it's called Webhelp.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: