It is a PR person’s nightmare.

PR people are often the ones called upon in a corporation to write fill-in-the-blanks press releases for their subsidiaries.

That way the same news release can be localized and then sent to the news media in a given area. The chances of a news release being used increases dramatically if it arrives from a local source.

United Airlines obviously does the same thing with its customer apology letters.

However, the New York Daily News is reporting one letter went out with no one bothering to fill in the blanks. The customer who received it promptly posted it on Reddit and it has gone viral.

“The user included a scan of the letter, which reads, in part: “Your comments regarding (SPECIFIC EVENT) will be used for coaching and training our employees. To encourage you to fly with us again and as a tangible means of acknowledging your disappointment, enclosed is (SPECIFIC ITEM). (CUSTOMER NAME), I ask you that you allow us another opportunity to serve you,” noted the story.

How could this happen?

Well, for one thing, many employees working today are not intelligent enough to write an apology letter (or news release) on their own. It would likely contain grammatical mistakes, misspellings, and reflect poorly on the company.

Let’s face it. How stupid of an employee must this United Airline employee have been to have sent this nonsensical letter to a customer? Obviously, the employee never even read the letter before sending it.

All he/she had to do was fill in the blanks, but that was obviously too much to ask.

United Airlines will get a black eye over the incident and will likely now have to send a letter to all its employees reminding them to fill in the blanks when sending letters to customers.

In reality, this entire incident is a sad commentary on the types of people in the workplace today.