Unpleasant Experiences

The last few weeks have involved legal threats on behalf of a particularly unpleasant individual who works as a Marketing Manager  in Ireland. Regular readers will recall, back in June 2009 that I received an email from this company which broke their own privacy policy – the Marketing Manager in question had used CC for the addresses instead of BCC – and I made some comments about my personal opinion about his intelligence, professionalism, and general competence.

Over the intervening two years, that Marketing Manager has been in touch once – yes, once – to ask (not tell – ask) me to temper my comments. As it was, I felt perfectly justified in my personal opinion of him, so I didn’t change the content. I did write another post, to show how much nastier I could be, but other readers prevailed upon my common sense, so the post was removed.

Yet this wasn’t enough for our Marketing Manager.

Oh, don’t forget, the post was always open for him to put his own point of view in the comments, or to apologise, or to contact me. In 2 and a half years, this man couldn’t be bothered to put fingers to keyboard and explain or comment. Indeed, he never even bothered responding to my email explaining my position, and that it was all a personal opinion.

Then about three weeks ago, I got a letter by email from Gore Grimes solicitors in Ireland – don’t be mean to them about their website – insisting I retract my comments about the Marketing Manager, because they were untrue, (no, the categorisation of this man as someone who didn’t know what he was doing was utterly true) defamatory, (not really – they were in response to his own error) and malicious. (also not true – although I wish now that they had been)

And so I offered a version of a retraction, which wasn’t accepted. So I’ve put up their version instead, and deleted the posts in question.

I’m not allowed to mention the name of this Marketing Manager. I’m not allowed to identify him – so I’m only describing him by his role. I can’t identify him on any site I control, or any social media I use.

Everything I’ve written on D4D™ is a personal opinion. In nine years, only one person has  complained about what I’ve said about them. Personally I think it’s bizarre for someone to go running to lawyers instead of dealing with an issue themselves. I think that people who work this way should be named and shamed, but I’m not allowed to do so.