Vendor spam: Let me tell you about our QA practice

Unsolicited commercial e-mail (spam) isn’t limited to just penis enlargement and viagra sales pitches. In the IT world, there are a number of ways that your e-mail address can be added to vendor mailing lists. For example, conference organizers gets sponsors for their events by providing the contact information of their attendees. This would be okay if the vendors were at least related to the reason you attended the conference in the first place. In my experience, you end up receiving dozens of phone calls and hundreds of e-mails for products and services you have no interest or use for.

This post is the first in a series where we will answer commercial vendor e-mails.

Subject: Hi Potential Sucker, let me tell you about our QA practice…

Potential Sucker,

As we all know in this industry, delivering successful, bug free products on schedule and on budget can be challenging.
Time consuming processes, changes in functionality, and resource constraints are only a few of the challenges in getting
your product out the door in a clean and efficient manner. At Annoying Vendor, we leverage a common sense approach that focuses
on key product success factors to help organizations deliver quality applications on time and on budget. Through proven
best practices, resources and technology, we help align and integrate your development and testing activities.
The result: Increased productivity, lower testing costs, and most importantly, a consistent and manageable testing process.

Here at Annoying Vendor, we offer a range of solutions that support your unique testing needs. May I speak with you about our
services and your current challenges?

Some Guy
Account Manager
________
xxx-xxx-xxxx
Microsoft Gold Certified Partner

and the winning response is:

“May I speak with you about our services and your current challenges?”

No. My current challenges are narrowly-defined and yet broadly applicable. Despite numerous efforts to encapsulate and enumerate their impacts, I find they have co-located to a single geospatial position. The gigantic burden they impose is sizable, yet they are occasionally lost in the clouds or behind rocks. These particular challenges tend to attract paranormal activity, but only within a physical context. Previous efforts to address these concerns have involved hot-air balloons, tightropes, and a jungle trip to a Mayan temple where we barely escaped from a rolling-boulder trap. And there were snakes. I hate snakes.

I’m sure your services are noble, exceptionally-delivered, and highly targeted to the broadest of industries and development platforms. I suspect they are shiny, lightweight, carbon-fiber supported, nanotube-encased wonders of the modern technical world. And colors. I bet they come in colors. Without a doubt, they can be delivered remotely from anywhere in the world, using a team of Sherpa coders programming via text message on a collection of cell phones networked together with discarded telegraph wires, a car battery, and the metal rib of an umbrella. You probably achieve operational efficiencies so outstanding that you’ll be able to invoice me for a negative amount.

Nonetheless, I am unable to discuss the challenges that interest you. They are highly-toxic, slightly radioactive, and extremely slippery when wet. Their density exceeds normal physical bounds and, if dropped, a localized black hole could develop. Unfortunately, they are also highly-sensitive to light, classified for “Top-Secret, Eyes-Only” clearance, and susceptible to self-destructive implosion upon distribution, even at the quantum level.

So for all these reasons, I must politely decline your request.

That, and the fact that I’m not responsible for the QA group in our organization.

Regards,
- Definitely Not Into QA

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