Startup CEO to Customer: "Fuck off"
Postmates exists within the complex west coast ecosystem of laziness-enabling apps. Say you want a cupcake, or pair of shoes, but don't want to get out of the bath: no problem. Almost anything fungible is within reach—but don't complain, because the founder and CEO of Postmates does not want to hear it.
Seattle resident Erin Boudreau was unhappy with her Postmates delivery experience, so she emailed customer support. At some point along the way, CEO Bastian Lehmann wrote the above message, which was then included in the thread to Erin. Whoops! Corporate transparency is good, and it's always a nice surprise to have the head of the company get his hands dirty in customer support, but not like this. In a pseudo-contrite blog post, Lehmann claimed the email was "a bad joke which was very poor in taste," which is exactly what you would say if you told someone to "fuck off" and it got back to them by accident.
Erin doesn't seem very impressed:
For what it's worth, I accept @basti's apology. However I don't believe instructing his team to tell me to "fuck off" was a joke or typo.
— Erin Boudreau (@Erin_Boudreau) September 15, 2013
Why can't anyone in tech just say "I'm sorry I was an asshole"?