A letter to the Queen……………..
I first wrote about this incident in 2014 and again in 2016 to celebrate the Queen’s 90th. Now, as we are about to celebrate 70 years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, I feel compelled to share it again.
It still makes me laugh today, so without further ado, I give you:
A letter to the Queen………………..
‘Your majesty,’ this Is how I imagine the letter of complaint about me and the service I was running might have begun? Unfortunately, at the time, I did not have the foresight to take a copy of the original letter.
This incident which occurred in 1997, taught me one fundamental lesson. If you are going to put ‘pen to paper’ and write a letter of complaint — then go straight to the top, do not ‘mess’ around with the people in between 😊.
The letter of complaint addressed to our Queen at Buckingham palace made its way over a few weeks (it did not take long) to my employer at the time. I only heard about it when my line manager waved a copy of it under my nose and asked me for an explanation. Warning me that I was to be questioned further by Senior Management.
Luckily for me, or maybe due to some prescience, I had laboriously copied out all the correspondence between myself and the author of the letter and so had a thick file of paperwork to present to Senior Management.
I was not worried, to be honest. I genuinely felt that we had done the best we could in the circumstances. We were operating before emails, video links, Skype etc., were in regular use. So perhaps our mistake was in being too optimistic in agreeing to support this student living in Hong Kong.
And with hindsight, I probably should have taken this to my manager at an earlier stage, after being sent the same pieces of work three or four times. With the same mistakes, comments and corrections made by the tutor, nothing seemed to move on.
Presented with my file, Senior Management could see what had happened, could see there was no fault attached to either party and decided that it made sense to refund his fees in full. They also wrote to the Queen’s office to assure them that the matter was now closed.
As for me, I continued with this employer for a few more years before deciding to move on and start my own business.
But it tickles me that there is a letter of complaint about me somewhere within the vaults at Buckingham Palace, and it tickles me that it found its way to my employer. Today I also feel a sense of pride that I live in a country where anyone from anywhere in the world can write to our Queen and potentially have their cause taken up.
Now that is what I call accountability, Boris.
So, there you have it, until next time.
Janice Taylor
