A letter of complaint to Tesco about some dodgy pasta

Dear Tesco,

My name is Chris Burgess and I’m an unsatisfied customer.

I am writing to you, having just projectile vomited all over my workstation in the office, to complain about a substandard pasta dish I purchased from one of your stores yesterday (Monday 17^th January 2011).

Let me set the scene:

I work in a college, a ten minute walk up the road from one of your stores – a Tesco Metro with friendly albeit unglamorous staff. Every day at lunchtime I walk to your shop and use the time to phone my mother’s dog. My mother holds the phone to her dog’s ear and I talk to the dog about my day.

“Poppy” is a good listener.

I regularly purchase your “meal deal” – where the customer (me) gets a choice of sandwich/pasta box, a can of Coke/bottle of fruit juice, and Walkers crisps/fruit. Not bad for 2 quid.

(I always get the crisps and Coke.)

However, yesterday I deviated from my usual choice.

A bright yellow “REDUCED” sticker caught my eye, and I saw that one of the bigger pasta boxes (too big to be part of the meal deal!) was marked down from £2 to £1.05.

“Bargainville, population: one”, I thought.

I was tempted – even, excited – by the prospect of this bigger pasta box for a number of reasons:

1 – More bang for my buck. In this case, the “bang” was pasta, but the “buck” was still slang for money.

2 – I’ve been getting a bit fed up of crisps (indigestion), and was happy that I wasn’t obliged to force them down as part of the meal deal.

3 – I am led to believe that the sugar and caffeine in the can of Coke I often drink at lunchtime is responsible for lively bursts of energy I sometimes get that can last about an hour. I have been reprimanded at work a number of times for being “hyperactive” and “playing sillybuggers” – such as the time I wore my tie around my head like Rambo, hid under my desk and made a long chain out of interlinking paper clips. I then talked in my robot voice and used my paper-clip chain to whip the ankles of my colleagues if they dared walk past my lair. The “mad hour” that the can of Coke brings on is inevitably followed by a sugar crash, which usually involves me putting my head on my arms on my desk pretending to be asleep so that nobody can see that I’m actually crying. Shenanigans such as this are the reason that I was not allowed Skittles as a child.

4 – The “REDUCED” sticker covered up the type of pasta on offer. This added an element of the unknown to the meal – it was like picking “the mystery box”, and I was excited by this. Closer scrutiny of the ingredients revealed that it was Southern Fried Chicken flavour, but I was still thrilled by the gamble.

5 – I am a big fan of Southern Fried Chicken. I once had a whole 10-piece bucket to myself in an attempt to impress a girl I was courting at the time. She was indeed impressed – she only ate 8 of her 10 pieces – but we both suffered from “chicken sweats” so a second-date was off the cards.

6 – With the pasta box priced at £1.05 I had an extra 95p, with which I bought some Skittles.

Pleased with myself and bragging of my bargain-hunting prowess to Poppy down the phone, I returned to work with my cut-price luncheon and sat, smug, at my desk and tucked in – the envy of all three people in the room. “This is probably the most satisfying lunch I’ve had all year”, I thought.

How wrong I was…

After eating (and I dare say, enjoying) approximately five sixths of the pasta meal, I realised, to my revulsion, that I wasn’t dining alone. In actual fact I was eating this pasta whilst under the unblinking gaze of a dead fly that had been caught between the outside of the box and the sticky label with the nutritional information on.

When I first noticed the dead fly I wasn’t aware that it was on the outside of the plastic box and thought it was on the inside with my food. I couldn’t help but instantly vomit everywhere. I was physically sick all over my desk, my keyboard, my mouse, and my notepad containing some very important notes and some very hilarious and potentially libellous drawings about Parry, (our office junior).

After my initial violent sickness I managed to catch my breath, however, out of the corner of my eye I saw the uninvited fly again, and heaved once more – filling two coffee mugs and the waste paper bin.

Now I know what you’re thinking: “Oh God Chris, I feel so ashamed to work for a company that is responsible for such a terrible experience – I feel ill just reading about this, it must have been horrendous to experience in person…”

But the carnage didn’t stop there.

The appalling sight of me being sick was too much for another of my colleagues – a sensitive, senior lady with thick-rimmed spectacles called Dawn – who also became physically sick. Sadly, however, for Ian (our IT guy), Dawn wasn’t quite as resourceful as I when it came to filling mugs or a bin, and Dawn was sick in Ian’s lap.

The sodden and furious Ian remonstrated with Dawn as she continued to up-chuck on Ian’s corduroy trousers (she later admitted that she felt it better to “keep it all in one place”…), but then he too also gave in to the bug (pun intended) and simply couldn’t stop himself from being sick on the back of Dawn’s head and on her neck and back.

Parry (our office junior) was aghast with these terrible scenes, and he too vomited – although he was polite enough to just be a little bit sick into his hands.

Dripping in Ian’s chunder, Dawn ran out of the office to the ladies’ room, leaving a sloppy wet trail behind her on the hard laminate floor, which caused Tony, our M.D, to slip over and bruise his hip and elbow.

I implore you, Tesco, to put yourself in my shoes, and imagine how humiliating it was for me to vomit in front of my colleagues and instigate this chaos. Tony was so angry with us all that he actually struck Parry (our office junior) with a file-o-fax that had sharp plastic edges.

Might I recommend that in future, when you are going to include a dead fly in your ready meals, that you advertise the product appropriately? Perhaps, “REDUCED TO ALMOST HALF PRICE (because of a dead fly)”? Or, how about: “BUY ONE, GET FLY FREE (fly is dead)”? Or even something more conversational, like “Fly corpse? Oh you knows it!” ?

Or, here’s a crazy idea – it’s a bit “out there” – thinking outside the box and all that, but bear with me… How about you just…DON’T include dead insects in your food? A harebrained, whacky scheme, I know, but it might just work.

I hope you’re happy with yourself, Tesco. It’s now Tuesday and Dawn and Ian won’t speak to each other because of a dispute over who should pay for Ian’s dry-cleaning bill; Parry (our office junior), has a nasty gash over his eye and his dad has scratched a rude word into the bonnet of Tony’s BMW; Tony, now in custody, was found by the police to have a bag of methamphetamine in his desk drawer and is likely to lose his job, his home, and his wife and kids; and I can’t even look at a packet of Skittles without having flashbacks of puking everywhere.

All because you think you’re too high and mighty to put up some strips of sugar paper covered in jam in your factories.

Nice one, Tesco.

Nice one.

Yours sincerely,

Chris Burgess.
Former customer.