When comedian Michael Ian Black ignored a guest satisfaction survey from his stay at a Doubletree hotel, he didn't expect a nagging reminder. "We noticed that you did not have time to complete the survey," advised a second email on the topic. "We are concerned that you may not have responded because we have somehow failed to live up to your expectations."

An irked Black responded with an open letter to Rob Palleschi, Global Head of Doubletree, taking him to task for the passive-aggressive assumption that time limitations prevented him from completing the survey.

"A clarification," notes Black. "The reason I did not fill out the survey is not because I did not have the time, but because I did not want to. To put that into survey language, on a scale from 1-10, with one being the lowest and ten being the highest, the amount I wanted to fill out your survey was zero, which is a little bit below the lowest number I can choose."

Black goes on to explain that no one anticipates a thrilling experience at a mid-price hotel chain, and that his sole expectation was that he would be left alone. Accordingly, while he would have rated his experience as "very good" prior to the survey requests, he says he now "would downgrade my overall experience to just 'satisfactory' because I do not like receiving surveys about my experiences."

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