There are no stupid attempts at satire, just stupid people.

Stimulus…

Dear World:

The United States of America , your quality supplier of ideals of liberty and democracy, would like to apologize for its 2001-2008 service outage.

The technical fault that led to this eight-year service interruption has been located, and the software responsible was replaced Tuesday night, November 4. Early tests of the newly-installed program indicate that we are now operating correctly, and we expect it to be fully functional by mid-January.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the outage, and we look forward to resuming full service — and hopefully even to improve it in years to come.

Thank you for your patience and understanding,

The USA

Response…

Dear The USA,

Thank you for your email. We'll add it to the confusing pile on the edge of our desk.

While we admire your dedication to customer service, we have to admit that we find your frequent apology emails baffling. There was no service outage between 2001 and 2008. We have been getting a steady supply of liberty and democracy from your fine organisation. The only difference is that over the last few years we've been getting increasingly distressed emails from your PR Department apologising for an outage that hasn't actually occurred.

Frankly, we're beginning to wonder if your PR Department has ever spoken to the staff in Supply. How about sitting down with your own people and actually communicating with them about how your organisation functions, rather than making a few insecure and slightly unhinged assumptions and then broadcasting them to us at The World?

Some of us at The World are also a little concerned that your much-vaunted January upgrade will in reality be a shiny new interface masking an inferior platform. The old interface may have been a little clunky but at least we knew that it wouldn't fall over the first time we put demands on it.

In conclusion, we thank you for your ongoing provision of quality liberty and democracy, and ask only two things: one, please stop apologising for an outage that didn't occur, and two, please don't confuse novelty with quality.

With kind regards,

The World