Dear Richard....

This is a real letter recently received by the Virgin Atlantic customer
complaints team in the UK and is currently being hailed on news blogs around the world (including The Telegraph) as possibly the funniest customer complaint letter ever.

Several media organisations have
called the Virgin Atlantic press office and they confirmed they
received the letter and that Richard Branson himself called the author
to thank him for the feedback.

Here’s the letter.

Dear Mr Branson

REF: Mumbai to Heathrow 7th December 2008

I love the Virgin brand, I really do which is why I continue to use it
despite a series of unfortunate incidents over the last few years. This latest
incident takes the biscuit.

Ironically, by the end of the flight I would have gladly paid over a
thousand rupees for a single biscuit following the culinary journey of hell I
was subjected to at the hands of your corporation.

Look at this Richard. Just look at it:

I imagine the same questions are racing through your brilliant mind as were
racing through mine on that fateful day. What is this? Why have I been given
it? What have I done to deserve this? And, which one is the starter, which one
is the desert?

You don’t get to a position like yours Richard with anything less than a
generous sprinkling of observational power so I KNOW you will have spotted the
tomato next to the two yellow shafts of sponge on the left. Yes, it’s next to
the sponge shaft without the green paste. That’s got to be the clue hasn’t it.
No sane person would serve a desert with a tomato would they. Well answer me
this Richard, what sort of animal would serve a desert with peas in:

I know it looks like a baaji but it’s in custard Richard, custard. It must
be the pudding. Well you’ll be fascinated to hear that it wasn’t custard. It
was a sour gel with a clear oil on top. It’s only redeeming feature was that it
managed to be so alien to my palette that it took away the taste of the curry
emanating from our miscellaneous central cuboid of beige matter. Perhaps the
meal on the left might be the desert after all.

Anyway, this is all irrelevant at the moment. I was raised strictly but neatly
by my parents and if they knew I had started desert before the main course, a
sponge shaft would be the least of my worries. So lets peel back the tin-foil
on the main dish and see what’s on offer.

I’ll try and explain how this felt. Imagine being a twelve year old boy
Richard. Now imagine it’s Christmas morning and you’re sat their with your
final present to open. It’s a big one, and you know what it is. It’s that
Goodmans stereo you picked out the catalogue and wrote to Santa about.

Only you open the present and it’s not in there. It’s your hamster Richard.
It’s your hamster in the box and it’s not breathing. That’s how I felt when I
peeled back the foil and saw this:

Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s more of that Baaji
custard. I admit I thought the same too, but no. It’s mustard Richard. MUSTARD.
More mustard than any man could consume in a month. On the left we have a piece
of broccoli and some peppers in a brown glue-like oil and on the right the chef
had prepared some mashed potato. The potato masher had obviously broken and so
it was decided the next best thing would be to pass the potatoes through the
digestive tract of a bird.

Once it was regurgitated it was clearly then blended and mixed with a bit of
mustard. Everybody likes a bit of mustard Richard.

By now I was actually starting to feel a little hypoglycaemic. I needed a
sugar hit. Luckily there was a small cookie provided. It had caught my eye
earlier due to it’s baffling presentation:

It appears to be in an evidence bag from the scene of a crime. A CRIME
AGAINST BLOODY COOKING. Either that or some sort of back-street underground
cookie, purchased off a gun-toting maniac high on his own supply of yeast. You
certainly wouldn’t want to be caught carrying one of these through customs.
Imagine biting into a piece of brass Richard. That would be softer on the teeth
than the specimen above.

I was exhausted. All I wanted to do was relax but obviously I had to sit
with that mess in front of me for half an hour. I swear the sponge shafts moved
at one point.

Once cleared, I decided to relax with a bit of your world-famous onboard
entertainment. I switched it on:

I apologise for the quality of the photo, it’s just it was
incredibly hard to capture Boris Johnson’s face through the flickering white
lines running up and down the screen. Perhaps it would be better on another
channel:

Is that Ray Liotta? A question I found myself asking over and over again
throughout the gruelling half-hour I attempted to watch the film like this.
After that I switched off. I’d had enough. I was the hungriest I’d been in my
adult life and I had a splitting headache from squinting at a crackling screen.

My only option was to simply stare at the seat in front and wait for either
food, or sleep. Neither came for an incredibly long time. But when it did it
surpassed my wildest expectations:

Yes! It’s another crime-scene cookie. Only this time you dunk it in the white stuff.

Richard…. What is that white stuff? It looked like it was going to
be yoghurt. It finally dawned on me what it was after staring at it. It
was a mixture between the Baaji custard and the Mustard sauce. It
reminded me of my first week at university. I had overheard that you
could make a drink by mixing vodka and refreshers. I lied to my new
friends and told them I’d done it loads of times. When I attempted to
make the drink in a big bowl it formed a cheese Richard, a cheese. That
cheese looked a lot like your baaji-mustard.

So that was that Richard. I didn’t eat a bloody thing. My only
question is: How can you live like this? I can’t imagine what dinner
round your house is like, it must be like something out of a nature
documentary.

As I said at the start I love your brand, I really do. It’s just a
shame such a simple thing could bring it crashing to it’s knees and
begging for sustenance.

Yours Sincererly…

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Here are the details of Richard Branson’s response