Mike Masnick
Techdirt
December 31, 2013

There are times when big brands with “social media people” might want to teach those junior level employees to recognize that using one of the standard “scripted” answers might be inappropriate. Take, for example, if you’re Dell and a new report has come out suggesting that the NSA has pretty much compromised your servers at the BIOS level with spy bugs, then, when someone — especially a respected security guy like Martin Wismeijer — tweets at you, you don’t go with the standard scripted “sorry for the inconvenience” response. But, apparently, that’s not how Dell handled things this time (thanks to Mike Mozart for the pointer):

@DellCares @dellcarespro Inconvenience? You got to be F*ckin kidding me! You place an NSA bug in our servers and call it an inconvenience?

— Martijn Wismeijer (@twiet) December 31, 2013

In case you can’t read that, Wismeijer complained on Twitter about finding out that his Dell server is bugged by the NSA (which might be an exaggeration…) and included the @DellCares account in his tweet. That account wrote:

Thank you for reaching out and regret the inconvenience. Our colleagues at @dellcarespro will be able to help you out.

Wismeijer responded with an expected level of anger. Not only is “regret the inconvenience” probably the inappropriate response to a customer complaining about the NSA installing malware, but the idea that Dell support “will be able to help you out” is similarly questionable.

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