Dear Ms Meesen,
In response to your complaint regarding the wishing well our company installed in your garden, we regret to hear that our product did not meet your expectations. Our sincere apologies for any inconvenience you have experienced. Regrettably, Ms Meesen, we cannot comply with your request for a refund. According to the European Sales and Warranty Directive, consumers are granted a two-year warranty on products and receive a refund if reasonable expectations are not met.
However, your complaint does not meet this condition. Your well is still in good working order after seven months and shows no visible defects. Our employee, who visited you personally, could not identify any construction faults. From the photographs, it is clear that everything was installed as agreed. A metre-deep pit was dug and lined with concrete. Around it, a wall of one-and-a-half metres high was built in Ardennes stone and the whole was topped with a cedar structure, a cast iron pulley and a roof with a garden gnome on it, as depicted in our catalogue.
But of course this is not what your complaint is about, Ms Meesen, we understand that – yet we mention it here for the sake of clarity, in order to leave no doubt about the quality of our products. Your complaint concerns something else. From your e-mail we understand that you have repeatedly made the same wish, by means of throwing a coin into the well, but that it has not yet come true. Obviously we regret this, but unfortunately your wish cannot be fulfilled. No one can bring your son back. Our deepest sympathy for your terrible loss – losing a child is the worst thing that can happen to a human being. But to expect that, after tossing a coin into our wishing well, your son would rise from the dead, we cannot, with the best will in the world, count among reasonable expectations of our product. I hope you can see that. And yes, Ms Meesen, as you rightly point out, the purpose of a wishing well is that one can entrust one’s deepest wishes to it, but nowhere is it guaranteed that these wishes will actually be fulfilled. We assume that, overcome with grief, you have temporarily lost sight of reality – this is understandable, grief takes many forms – and it is a lovely thought that your son might return to you thanks to our wishing well, but reality is unfortunately rather less romantic.
We would like nothing better than to make everyone’s dreams come true with our wishing wells, but this is still a future aspiration, for the time being our clients will have to make do with the idea that their wishes might be heard and answered. We would love for your son to have been returned to you, fit and well, and that you could have taken him in your arms at the train station and told him how unbearably long the wait had been and how much you loved him. We truly wish he could have lived a long life and given you grandchildren and the joy that comes with them. We would much rather you had written to us with a different complaint, one say about loose mortar between the Ardennes stones or a garden gnome that had been blown away, and not this email, not this heart-breaking account of the loss of your only, precious son.
Nevertheless, Ms Meesen, we cannot refund you. If we do, we will set a precedent and after that we will be deluged. After all, you are not the only person with an unfulfilled wish. Almost every day we get a letter or e-mail from a dissatisfied customer, most recently a sixty-two year-old woman with Parkinson’s disease. When she was diagnosed five years ago, she asked her wishing well for a quick, painless death. Now she is totally paralyzed and in a wheelchair. Her daughter, who filed the complaint – after all, her mother can no longer write – called us heartless conmen. She demanded an unreasonable amount of money and threatened to sue us all the way to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. As distressing as this situation is, we cannot redress this matter either. We refer to the manual accompanying our wishing wells, which states under paragraph 23 that not all wishes will be fulfilled.
Admittedly – and here we acknowledge some responsibility – our communications should have been clearer. We are committed to transparency. We regret that we may have inadvertently misled some customers. We should not have limited ourselves to a simple statement at the back of a manual. We should have made a statement on the wishing well itself from the beginning: WISHING WELL INC. IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR UNFULFILLED WISHES. I can tell you that we are working on this now, Ms Meesen. Our next generation wishing wells will rule out any possible confusion. Please find attached the 3D design of our new models, with a clear warning on a sign on the garden gnome’s lap – in LED letters, so that even those who make a wish in the dark know where they stand. Your complaint has not fallen on deaf ears; we have taken it very seriously. After all, we consider feedback from our customers to be very important. Thanks to critical comments from you and others, we can continuously improve and refine our products. We deeply appreciate your contribution, which will result in future customers never feeling cheated again. And so, Ms Meesen, may it be a consolation to you that your son’s death was not entirely in vain after all.
With best wishes,
Kees Verburgh,
Wishing Well Customer Service Operator
Please quote your case reference number in all communications with us.
© Joris Vermassen