Telecom mag gives staff a cheer-up

Telecom's in-house magazine has published letters from forgiving XT customers so its 8000 staff know some people still love them.

The magazine - called Co. - says it is trying to put the brutal days of XT mobile crashes in the past by running forgiving notes that were "anonymous and yet entirely genuine" letters of commendation.

"After the brutal few months you've been through we'd like to offer you some happy pills," editor Dita De Boni writes, alongside a picture of some red and blue tablets.

A business customer writes: "Although we have experienced a few outages of XT service ... this has not affected our perception of the business proposition offered by Telecom.

"As business operators ourselves we understand the complex issues arise in business and often take significant steps to overcome."

The anonymous customers just loved Telecom's XT technology: "Yours is a highly advanced technology field with not insubstantial geographic issues to contend with.

"We simply don't expect you to get it right first time - even though we know you will try to."

Another forgiving customer wrote: "It sucks that you guys are having problems with XT. It will be a beautiful network when it is ready ... cheers Telecom keep fighting the good fight."

Media were given a blast by one Telecom fan. "I am disgusted by the media bandwagon who find it a necessity to be critical of the outages. Any new and innovative network will have teething problems."

Asked about the enthusiastically forgiving tone of the letters, De Boni said said the letters represented 25 per cent of the letters she had seen and were chosen to balance the stories about negative events elsewhere in the magazine.

"We are saying we know you are getting a hammering and saying - here is something that is a happy pill for you," she said.

She said the letters were bona fide and signed but Co. did not have time to obtain permission for the names to be published.

Co. is published by Tangible Media.