A Letter from the Dentist Triggers Pointless Meandering

My 3-year old received the following letter in the mail yesterday:

Dear Micaela,

 

This is a friendly reminder that you are overdue for your recall appointment. We value you as a patient and would like to encourage you to keep up with regular check-ups. We feel we can help you attain optimum dental health, which will allow you to require less overall treatment. We believe you are an asset to our practice and look forward to seeing you again.

 

After Micaela read the letter, she got quite upset.

 

"Dad," she said, "how did we let so much time pass since my last visit to the dental practice? I remember that we agreed to keep up on both the frequency and regularity of my appointments. Now there's a good chance that my dental health is sub-optimal and my treatment regimen is going to become quite onerous. What's worse, I feel like I've let everyone down. They value me, they believe I'm an asset, and now look how we've betrayed their team."

 

I love our dentist and his entire team. I recognize that I'm being completely unfair in singling them out for the very common crime of trying to communicate in a personalized way, while in fact doing the exact opposite. (I've heard some great stories about what can go wrong, my absolute favourite of which was from a work colleague who made some sort of complaint to a hotel manager and received a 'personalized' letter in response which had been photocopied with an attached post-it note saying "Send him the cockroach letter.")

 

But I'll use this letter to illustrate a few points:

 

Point 1: (The obvious one) If you are trying to send out a mass communication with a personal touch, try really, really hard to get it right, or don't bother at all. If your patients are valued, if they are an "asset to your practice", communicate with them in a genuine way. If you're just sending out an automated reminder, make it an automated reminder:

 

Dear Patient,

This automatic reminder has been sent because you are past due for you next appointment. Please call us.

 

Point 2: Don't pull out the big words when you're trying to send a simple message. Without being blatantly impersonal as in Point 1, this letter could have said:

 

Dear Micaela,

Where are you? It's time for your next appointment. In fact, you're a little late. Please call to set something up.

 

Point 3: When people get older, they like to get irate about really unimportant stuff. It makes them feel good to shake their cane at the world and say "In my day, ..." I feel like it's time I join their ranks:

 

In my day, this letter would have been delivered by a postman (yes, a post"man") dragging himself up to our front stoop with small dogs gnawing on each of his legs and a big friendly smile on his face, saying "Mornin' Hank - here's the post". (In my day, men called each other Hank).

 

Letter in hand, I would have summoned the whole family to the sitting room to open the letter together. Having heard their father's summons, all 3 of the girls would have come running in from the field - where they were busy doing their morning chores - kissed my cheek and sat dutifully, faces alight with anticipation at what the letter might say. They most certainly wouldn't be away at University getting an edu-m'cation.

 

In fact, instead of just the 3 of them, there would have been a whole brood gathered around - 14 kids in all - as we read the letter. And it would have said something like:

 

Dear Henrietta, (because that's what we called girls back then)

Now that you are 3 years old, we wanted you to know that one day soon it will be time for you to start coming to the dentist. For now, you can eat all the sweets you want because your teeth are going to fall out anyways.