Some years ago, a US fashion designer contacted one of our editors. He wanted something removed from our site, and she rightly referred him to me.
Except by the time it was raised with me, it was a very rude assistant handling the matter.
I asked if there was anything wrong with the piece. If we had erred, I was prepared to fix it, even if it was over a decade old.
It turned out that nothing was wrong. They were simply incensed that the photo showed up so highly in the Google image search as they wanted all their images to be top.
I noted that the designer’s PR firm provided the photo to us and they had wanted the publicity.
Their counter? We had never heard of you so we find this unlikely.
I was able to go back to my July 2009 emails and found that their PR firm had contacted us.
Without being immodest, many people have heard of us.
I asked my editor to have the designer contact me himself as I wasn’t about to deal with an underling who was throwing insults at me while wanting us to do them a favour. He never did.
The photo remains up high in Google, as do images from many other parties when searching for this designer’s name. Fittingly, they never wound up dominating the search results. It was all for nought.
You’d think these matters were rare or, given the present occupant of the White House, more likely to be American, but I was reminded tonight that they aren’t.
This time, another assistant decided to be combative from the outset because her organization had taken exception to the form of address we had used for her boss, and how we described her.
You try to help by giving a non-profit supposedly doing good things some publicity out of the goodness of your heart, and this is the thanks you get.
Never mind that the form and profession are what the British government used in official documentation.
Our policy is that we accept that one has the right to be addressed in the way one wants.
Not only was she rude to an intermediary who forwarded me their request, when she reached out to me, she doubled-down, failed to apologize, and remained condescending throughout.
Had there been some basic common courtesy, I would have acceded to one or both of her requests.
The up shot of all this was we chose to remove the article altogether, and everyone lost. It’s the exact opposite to what Panos Papadopoulos said in his autobiography, when he said symbioses were key to his success.
I can’t really understand the ‘I need a favour from you so I’ll be rude to you’ approach that both an American company, and a British institute that I had once respected, decided to employ.
You wonder if certain people have any empathy with how they deal with others, and sometimes I fear this is going to get worse in the Anglosphere, especially with the US’s current slide.
All we can do in the face of incivility is to keep our chin up, and forge along honestly and with integrity—and not let our good name be dragged down by people who, ultimately, do not matter. What a shame their bosses let their assistants run riot—assuming they even know.
Jack Yan is founder and publisher of Lucire.
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