Dear readers, here’s another chapter of a saga which I do not intend to give a headline to. My old employer is out for my blood! Yet another missive from SPH, this time, signed.
Dear Bertha
We note that you posted our letter in Part 2 of your blog. You say you set an 11am deadline for a reply from us. When and where did you give us that 11am deadline? It was not in your email to us (below), nor did you communicate it to anyone in SPH that we know.
In your latest blog you say: “Whatever SPH had done for him, the fact is that that was how he felt. I reported the last weeks of my friend’s life accurately.”
The issue is not whether you reported what he said accurately, but whether you have been fair to SPH and to your ex-colleagues. To say this is how Chee Kin felt must surely mean that we, in fact, treated him as a pariah. The facts are quite the opposite, but you never bothered to check with us. So you left and continue to leave your readers with the mistaken belief that SPH treated him as a pariah.
You also say SPH “could have done better than to pick on a couple of pars about a dead man. It’s an obituary, for crying out loud!”. We do know what an obituary is. The question is whether you’re aware that an obituary doesn’t give you licence to be unfair to former colleagues.
You now say you don’t wish to prolong the grieving process for Chee Kin’s family and friends. If you genuinely felt this way, you ought to have thought twice about including those “couple of pars” in your blog. You should also have resisted the cheek of telling us (and your readers) how we should have crafted a more gracious reply to you – after you hurled mud at us. If this is not being pious, we don’t know what is.
ps: We regret that our last letter was not signed. That was the wrong SOP on our part.
Best regards
Gary Yeo
Assistant Manager
Corporate Communications
Singapore Press Holdings
Reply: This is my second followup email to SPHCORP on a deadline.
On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 5:12 AM, Bertha H wrote:
Dear SPH,
I realised that I did not give a deadline on your response before posting
on my blog. It is 11am, Monday, that is, today.
regards
bertha
ps. I not engaging SPH on this anymore. If it wants to keep sending me letters, I will just keep publishing them.