My final letter to KPTM. If you haven’t read their response, or my original letter, do that first!
Mr. Wilson ::
Thank you for returning my letter. It is interesting that I sent this exact letter to KPTM’s contact42@kptm.com email address a week before messaging it to KPTM via Facebook and did not hear anything. Even though my letter was slightly ‘mean-spirited’ as you put it, I had hoped to at least get a response back that addressed the issue I was reporting.
Unfortunately I did not.
However, with your letter, you got the ‘contact me back’ part down, but again, my issue was simply addressed as “the HD situation” and never spoken about beyond that.
In case the problem has been lost in our digressions, I’ve included my main problem below :
I have a widescreen HDTV (as I am sure many of your users do) when the Children’s Hosptal ‘Time Box’ Ad comes out from the left of the screen it causes the widescreen format of your shows (like American Idol for instance) to switch to a vertical letterbox format. Also the sound cuts out which, when watching any show (but especially one about singing!) is absolutely annoying and extremely unprofessional. Then, the stupid clock stays there for 10 seconds and it all happens again when the program ‘cuts’ back to widescreen mode. Can you really, in 2009, not figure out a way to do this WITHOUT program interruption?
That is all I want fixed.
I am not interested in your life or why you do what you do or how your family gets fed because, quite honestly, my letter never should have reached you in the first place. And just because I slammed your news show (from outside your target audience I assume) I get a letter back from the lead anchor that gives me life advice because, instead of addressing my issue, you wanted me to better understand where you are coming from.
Look, of course I am a person (as you put it), but you must understand that I am first and foremost, KPTM’s customer. My CUSTOMER opinion of KPTM is not a good one. That is why I wrote the letter the way I did. That is also why I wrote it never expecting a reponse.
Regardless, I know enough to understand that, at the time of concern (during KPTM’s Children’s Hospital ‘Time Box’ ad), there is someone manually making that logo appear and switching the video feed format to get it on my screen. Then, a few seconds later, they reverse that process and switch the video format back to the live HD feed for American Idol. Each time of course, the sound of the live feed cuts out.
I also know that, if you have enough pride and love for the work you do and the station you do it at, you would find this as unacceptable as I do.
I do believe you have passion for your job Mr. Wilson. And I hope you have enough to walk into Master Control tomorrow (before Idol airs of course) and see if there is anything they can do about this problem. My gut says there is someone in that room that can make this better or offer up a solution to at least make it tolerable (a.k.a. No sound loss).
In closing, I don’t need a response back from you Mr. Wilson. I can imagine you are a very busy man and don’t have time to get caught up in massive amounts of open dialogue with customer’s (outside your market segment).
However, I do have one more (rhetorical) question for you:
What’s in an award? I’ve won awards and they do not define me or make me any better at what I do. I think the focus (for me anyway) always needs to come back to ‘Why am I doing this and how can I do it better?’ I hope that is the case for you as well. And if it is, prove it. And when you do, tell the boys in Master Control hello for me.
~ m
I will be watching American Idol tomorrow night in hopes that, even the lamest dreams can be achieved in this wondrous land we call America. Even dreams about television stations that don’t do stuff super janky. The wait begins! Later gators!