Sunday 28 December 2008

Bad Times, a Letter to Muji


To:Customer Services 
Muji Europe Holdings Limited 
8-12 Leeke Street 
London 
WC1X 9HT 


Dear Sirs/Hunnies,

I have long been a fan of Muji's functional minimalism. I believe your pencil cases are the stationary equivalent of a Zen Koan, and for this I thank you.

However, this festive season you failed me, and, in a deeper sense, you failed yourselves.


I received two Muji gifts from Santa, a pumice stone and an Egg Timer. The pumace stone was a well cut piece of solidified pyroclastic froth that will perform adequately upon corns and dry skin (which I currently dont posses). 

The egg timer leaves me with an incredulous sense of despair at your quality control. Both the package and the device specify it is a 3 minute egg timer but, after multiple tests, including the one on this youtube video, it saddens me to say the timer times a period of 2 minutes and 56 seconds.



I hope you will agree that a four second error is simply not acceptable when determining such relatively short metrics.

I like this egg timer, it looks good, and, before realising the temporal blasphemy this timer commits every time it times, I was going to carry it around with me to time things. This is no longer possible.

I am sure you will refund me whatever this item cost, but I don't want that. I want a either a three minute Muji egg timer that times for three minutes exactly, or twelve Muji egg timers with an error margin of no more than five seconds in either direction. This latter option provides the possibility that when needed I can use all twelve timers and average out the result. Thus, we would hope, achieving something like accuracy.

My address to send either one accurate, or twelve inaccurate, Muji egg timers is:

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Once recvived I hope we can put this malign point in our supplier/consumer relationship behind us.

Warm regards,


Mat.....



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