
Dad gets OfficeMax mail addressed 'Daughter Killed in Car Crash' - coloneltcb
http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-officemax-mail-20140119,0,6457094.story#axzz2qubhydAY
======
patio11
There are a lot of moving parts in many complex systems, and occasionally bugs
arise which people who do not build complex systems for a living ascribe to
huge amounts of malice and not, e.g., a mis-transposition in a SQL query or a
missing tab in a file compiled by a temp hired by a firm four degrees from
OfficeMax.

For OfficeMax, the most important takeaway is probably "You should encourage
your employees to apologize and demonstrate empathy, and you should give line
managers a BatPhone to the CEO's office because this is certainly BatPhone-
worthy."

(I once worked as a customer service telephone operator for a large office
supply store which is a direct competitor of OfficeMax. I'm quite aware that
their call center receives, minimally, several hundred calls a month from
people who have sharply different takes on consensual reality than most of us
do. That said, I also remember the two keys I'd need to hit on the phone to
get the Vice President on the line, and I'm absolutely positive that if I had
escalated that call in that fashion my boss would have said "That was the
right decision.")

~~~
brazzy
The question is not how that text got to be on the envelope, the question is
why a retail company had collected that piece of information about a customer
in the first place!

~~~
patio11
Someone typed it into a computer at some time in the past, and after
information is in a computer, it remaining in a computer is a much safer bet
than "And then it got deleted and we never spoke about it again."

For example, suppose a marketing company has a computer system which organizes
people by households. They call a household and ask for a particular member.
She's recently deceased. They type a note on that household's record, with the
intention that the next person accessing that record knows that they should
under no circumstances ask for the daughter who recently passed away in tragic
circumstances. Some years later, a software or process bug results in that
record getting entered into a mail merge.

------
memset
This is awful. It is not only awful due to being relentlessly insensitive, but
it it another affirmation of something that has always taken place in
marketing: dehuminzation.

We think about "conversion rates", "retention rates", "buy our CRM to keep
track of all of your relationships!" just like that jerk who kept a
spreadsheet of his okcupid dates. (Okcupid dating is similarly dehumanizing -
one begins to treat it like an online marketing funnel.) Like we're all sheep
being herded through a funnel-shaped fence by some social media manager in
midtown.

Turns out these are just people, trying to get by in life, who don't really
benefit that much from folks trying to scrape every iota of data about them
just to get 'em to buy what, in this case, a pack of cheap ballpoint pens or
something? Sheesh.

~~~
baddox
What about this story do you think is an example of dehumanization?

~~~
brazzy
The fact that companies collect and _trade_ this hugely personal, emotional
information about their customers in order to fake a small-town general store
atmosphere where the guy at the counter knows everyone's personal history,
when in fact it's just a minimum wage call center drone looking at a CRM
database.

------
eurleif
Maybe this was meant to be a private note? I.e., a customer service rep at
some company found out about their daughter, and they wanted to make sure
other customer service reps would know about it and show appropriate
sensitivity, so they added it to the CRM database. But somehow it ended up in
the address instead of a private note field, and it was passed on to other
companies.

People are making it sound like the company was intentionally trying to use
their dead daughter for marketing purposes. I doubt that is the case.

~~~
brazzy
Yes, that's almost certainly what happened - but that doesn't make it better.
It's _none of their fucking business!!_ This is not something that belongs in
a CRM database!

~~~
eurleif
If you went to a small store regularly, would it be creepy for the employees
to know that about you? Why is it creepy for a big business to know the same
thing? It's normal for businesses to get to know their customers.

~~~
brazzy
Businesses are not persons, and it's creepy for them to try and fake personal
relationships via CRM databases.

~~~
eurleif
Why is the personal relationship "fake" just because it's made with a database
instead of human memory? Because the company doesn't really care about the
daughter? Would it be creepy if employees at a smaller store remembered a
customer's daughter dying, and were sensitive to that fact, but didn't
actually personally care about it?

------
reuven
I'm guessing that companies are using all sorts of things, including newspaper
articles, to be able to identify target markets. That doesn't bother me too
much; once information is online, there's very little you can do to stop
people from seeing it, and making these associations seems like a logical
step.

That said, there are two major problems that I see here:

(1) The lack of a European-style law allowing people to find out what
information a company has about them. The recipient of this mail should be
able to ask Office Max what information they have about him, and they should
be required to provide it, as well as say from whom they got the original
information. Saying that they bought the information from a third party is a
cop out.

(2) Some programmer, somewhere in Office Max, did an incredibly stupid JOIN,
or the equivalent for whatever database they were using. I can't imagine what
the possible reason was for displaying this sort of thing, and printing it
out, but displaying that sort of "rationale" field is a huge no-no. In this
particular case, it completely traumatized the parents, who had already gone
through an awful experience.

It seems incredibly obvious to me that Office Max should apologize to this
family. Whatever it takes to fix this, they should do. Free merchandise for
the parents seems cheesy, but perhaps establishing a scholarship in the
daughter's name, or something to help grieving parents, or to prevent car
accidents, would be reasonable.

~~~
scott_karana
I like Europe's privacy laws in theory, but who's to say that the company is
actually going to tell you the full story, and not just lie?

For all we know, their sensitive "customer analytics" fields are not dumped
when you make an information request, so you might only get a sanitized
response?

~~~
nasmorn
Every person in the chain signs an agreement that they will serve jail time if
it is found out you did it. Kinda makes it hard for companies to have their
employees lie for them on this

~~~
scott_karana
Wow, that's pretty impressive. Decent solution. :)

------
p9idf
Some junk mailers scrape the web for addresses:

    
    
      King George II
      Kermit Project
      612 W 115th St
      New York, NY 10025-7721
    

[http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/george.html](http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/george.html)

~~~
RK
Not quite the same, but I used to receive junk mail addressed to "Jesus
Christ" at an old address.

------
coin
'Seay said that he called an OfficeMax number Friday and that a manager at a
call center refused to believe he'd been sent the letter addressed that way.'

'Then, he said, a spokeswoman for OfficeMax "acted the same way" shortly
before he was interviewed by NBC-5 reporter Nesita Kwan on Friday. (Kwan told
The Times she couldn't comment until she received approval from her
supervisors.) The spokeswoman was more conciliatory after she received a photo
of the envelope, Seay said.'

As usual it's not acknowledged until it's taken public.

~~~
vacri
It doesn't sound like you've worked in a call centre that services the general
public. Stuff like this is workaday complaints from people who are either a
bit crazy or just bored and looking for a fight.

------
rosser
This is in many ways worse than the incident where Target outed a pregnant
teen to her parents by mailing coupons for baby stuff to her, at her parents'
address, based on her shopping habits.

~~~
protomyth
I'm not so sure. There is a chance that given a different father, the girl
identified as pregnant could have been killed. This incident increased grief
from a death that already occurred.

------
aridiculous
For some reason, this particular story of hit me hard. I'm rarely affected by
human interest stories.

Maybe because it's the quintessential example of the tension between abstract
systems and conscious life.

If this kind of thing isn't enough to get people to take technology and
business ethics seriously, I don't think there's much preventing the rise of a
sociopathic society.

Computers, engines and rats != people.

------
pkill17
Sadly, it reminds me of The Office where Michael Scott would always remember
one striking fact about someone to connect with them.

It seems this third party mailing list populated the wrong fields with some
sensitive info. Terrible mistake, really. Must've been an awful jolt when they
saw it.

------
car
This is about human dignity, and it's just disgusting. I'd be ashamed to work
at OfficeMax or any of those data collection firms.

 _" Retail giant Target reportedly knows how to use its data to identify
pregnant customers, and it recently lost tens of millions of customers' credit
and debit card information to hackers, among other data."_

 _" Gatherers of consumer data also are reportedly selling off lists of rape
victims and AIDS and HIV patients, a privacy group told Congress in
December."_

I shudder thinking about what kind of information about all of us is being
collected and sold, without any recourse. And corporate interests are keeping
better privacy laws from getting passed. So the can squeeze the maximum profit
from consumer cattle.

All of us working in 'big data' should think real hard what we deem ethically
acceptable.

------
coloneltcb
The ugly side of big data

~~~
sheetjs
The article suggests a simpler explanation:

> ... a result of a mailing list rented through a third-party provider

This is analogous to someone looking at the obituaries in a newspaper and
cross-referencing the phone book.

~~~
manish_gill
Except when it's automated, as the top comment said, it gets dehumanised.
Presumably there is a real human being reading the obituary and cross-
referencing, who would be sensitive enough not to include that information.

This is disgusting.

------
userbinator
Reminds me of this:
[http://www.snopes.com/business/consumer/bastard.asp](http://www.snopes.com/business/consumer/bastard.asp)

~~~
corobo
This is why I don't even put sarky comments in code.. Funny but not lose your
job funny

------
Oculus
I think the biggest story isn't how the mail is addressed, but that most
people don't realize that large corporations know everything (minus one) about
you.

------
pan69
>> OfficeMax said in a statement that the mailing was a mistake and that it
was using another company's mailing list.

Why are they using another companies mailing list? What's wrong with theirs?

~~~
ballard
The bigger issue is trying to pass this off as somebody else's fault, which
comes off as weak bullshit.

------
pm
I've seen something like this happen before, where a person registered an
offensive phrase as a business name on a mailing list and was getting mail for
it because no-one bothered to check the name. The fact that the mail was
qualified with "... or current business" suggests a similar possibility (it
really wouldn't be hard to register a place of business on Google Maps as
"Daughter Killed In Car Crash" at his address).

The corollary is that someone out there's a real fucking asshole.

------
cynwoody
This nonsense been going on for decades.

Back in the eighties, I came across a computer letter addressed to "Mr. Intl
B. MacHines". Very simple. Upper-case garbage in, mixed-case garbage out!
Printed using a mylar ribbon, so it looked like it was typed on an eighties
executive office typewriter. (At the time, computer output was usually upper
case and of lesser print quality, thus the mylar ribbon deception.)

------
lozf
That's worse than the time Amazon emailed me with the subject line: _" I hope
you die soon."_

~~~
cynwoody
Okay. In honor of the late Paul Harvey, what's the rest of the story?

~~~
lozf
Browsing some books for a Buddhist friend tripped their "recommend similar
items" algorithm. They got a bug report and I got a fiver credit.

------
gojomo
I'd guess it was the result of a manual data-entry error after a previous
telemarketing call. A rep meant to press a 'remove' button, adding a note -
but the note wound up instead as an address line of a still-active entry.

~~~
userbinator
My guess is that "daughter killed in car crash" ended up in the field where
someone's position would usually go.

------
eloff
I couldn't even read the story on my Nexus. It amazes me that I was bombarded
with three popup ad dialogs, the last of which replaced the original page
somehow. On the latimes website!?!

