This morning I finally received a letter (pictured) telling me that I hadn’t been selected for the Australia 2020 Summit. Gosh. I’d already figured that out from not being on the published lists of those who were going.
Apart from the rather late arrival of the news and the traditional passive-voice bureaucratic writing style, there’s two interesting points about this letter.
- I left the “title” field of the nomination form blank, since I don’t use them. I think titles like “Mr”, “Miss”, “Mrs”, “Ms” etc are an archaic way of labelling people. Nevertheless they felt compelled to use “Mr/s”, even though I had filled in the gender field.
- The official website said that people who applied via email, like me, would receive an email reply. They can’t even follow their own published procedure.
I really am trying to find good-news stories about the Summit, I really am…