Thank You for Your Interest

A translation exercise.

Dear Customer,

Thank you for your recent order, placed Tuesday at 9:47pm: one large Quarter Pounder meal, six Chicken McNuggets, one Oreo McFlurry.

After careful consideration, a decision has been made to proceed with other customers this evening. We received an exceptionally high volume of strong orders, and while yours was reviewed with genuine interest, we are unable to move forward with it at this time.

Due to the volume of orders received, we are unable to provide individual feedback.

We encourage you to order again in future, and we wish you every success in your endeavours.

Kind regards,
The Orders Team

This needs no explanation. If you’re one of the multitude laid off in 2026, a year we are somehow only halfway through, the wording probably smarts like a toe against the cabinet corner. But here’s the other place you’ve read this letter.

Investigating (21:47) - We are aware of an issue affecting a small subset of users. Our teams are actively engaged and working towards resolution. We appreciate your patience.

Identified (22:31) - The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented. No further updates are available.

Resolved (23:58) - This incident has been resolved. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

The institutional note has one grammar, whether it’s declining your application or your uptime.

Lay the two documents on the same table and start cutting.

“Thank you for your recent order.” “We are aware of an issue.” Acknowledgement without admission. Both sentences confirm that something happened while conceding nothing about what. You existed. It occurred. That is as far as either document is prepared to go under oath.

“A decision has been made.” “The issue has been identified.” The passive voice, doing the one job it was ever hired to do: removing the actor from the scene. Nobody decided. Nobody broke anything. A decision occurred. An issue arose. Weather, in other words. Somewhere a human clicked a button, and this grammar exists so that you will never meet them.

“An exceptionally high volume of strong orders.” “A small subset of users.” Arithmetic as absolution, and notice it runs in opposite directions. The rejection inflates the field until you are a rounding error inside it. The status page shrinks the blast radius until the harm barely clears zero. Same trick, mirrored: adjust the denominator until the injured party rounds to nothing.

“We are unable to provide individual feedback.” “No further updates are available.” The closed loop. Unable, not unwilling. Available, as though updates were a natural resource and the seam ran dry. Both report incapacity where they mean policy, and both end the conversation while sounding like customer service. Courtesy doing the work of a locked door.

“We wish you every success in your endeavours.” “We apologise for any inconvenience caused.” The benediction. One blesses your journey away from them. The other apologises to a hypothetical, since “any inconvenience” allows for the possibility there was none. Nobody is sorry. A sentence is sorry. You are dismissed with love.

Treat the grammar as an experiment. Hold the language perfectly still, raise the stakes, and watch for the moment it blinks.

Dear Customer, thank you for your recent enquiry regarding the disputed transaction on your account. After careful consideration, a decision has been made not to return your funds at this time. Due to the volume of enquiries received, we are unable to enter into further correspondence regarding this outcome. Thank you for being a loyal customer.

You have received this one, or something within a rounding error of it.

Dear Policyholder, following careful review, your claim has been assessed as ineligible under the terms of your policy. No further review is available at this time. We thank you for your understanding.

This one is not parody. I have only made it shorter.

Thank you for calling. We are currently experiencing a high volume of calls. Your call is important and will be answered as soon as possible. Please do not hang up. We appreciate your patience.

That one is real too. It plays on a loop to people doing CPR with the phone on speaker. It is polite all the way to the end.

Now read the ladder back and notice what never moved: the grammar. Not one clause blinked between the nuggets and the arrest. Same careful consideration, same high volumes, same patience, same love. A voice that does not change when the stakes do is not a voice. It is machinery, running at whatever scale you feed it. Which leaves the only question this essay actually cares about. Not how dare they. Who is they?

Nobody, and everybody.

The recruiter with a thousand applications, a legal-approved template, and a performance review that counts hires and keeps no column for the declined. The volume clause was the one honest sentence in the letter: there really are a thousand. The comms lead mid-incident, typing with legal peering over one shoulder, every adjective a potential exhibit in a lawsuit that hasn’t been filed yet.

Neither is lying. Both are trapped. Deviation is personal risk; the template is institutional shelter.

And on the top rung, no author at all. Nobody declines you an ambulance. The queue does it arithmetically; the wait is the letter. That is the template in its final form, no longer needing a hand to hide.

This language is not written so much as secreted. Apply enough scale and enough lawyers to any institution and the prose emerges on its own, the way a gland answers pressure. No one decides. The recruiter has a folder of these letters at home. The comms lead refreshes some other company’s status page when the banking app dies. Everyone inside the machine is standing outside another one.

Here is the translation, the version no one sends:

Dear Applicant,

Nobody read your application. You were number eight hundred and forty-three; we stopped reading somewhere in the two hundreds. Nothing was wrong with you. There was no field, strong or otherwise. There was a number, and it was too big. We will not think of you again.

No institution could send that letter and survive the week. That is not a defence of the euphemism. It is a reason, which is a different thing.

I have been that person. I have written nothing, four sentences long, while people refreshed the page on the other side of it. I knew more than the update said. We almost always do. But deviation is personal risk, and the template is institutional shelter, and I took the shelter. Every time. I am fluent in this language because I wrote it for a living.

I never sent the honest version either.