Steve Jobs officially sick of receiving whiny emails

Valleywag is reporting today a new delightful exchange of emails between Steve Jobs and a random person. This time we are dealing with a senior student in journalism from Long Island University (pictured here) who emailed Steve complaining she didn’t get answers from Apple’s PR department for her school work.

I’ll start by saying this exchange has to be handled with all usual precautions, because it’s happened before that supposedly “authentic” emails were in fact 100% fake. But let’s consider this one real.

The first comment I’ll make is on the obvious bias of Gawker Media toward Apple’s CEO, which is obvious if you have a look at the actual exchange (below) before reading Valleywag’s depiction of it. The post conveys the idea that the student is being insulted by a “stubborn” super-rich CEO who treats customers like shit. The feeling I got reading the emails is pretty different.

Indeed, I am not surprised by Steve’s responses and in fact totally agree with him. I am saying this based on my own experience. Since I run a website about Steve Jobs, once in a while, I get emails from students who ask for help on their homework. If the question is asked politely and on a precise point which is not available on the website, I do my best in helping them. If the answer is on the website, I direct them to the page where it is. But this is not the way most emails go – usually, they tend to sound something like: ” I have to do a paper on [something remotely in relation with SJ]. Please send me the info.” Of course if I bother to reply, it’s to tell them to go to hell. The fact that I am a student myself makes me even more confident in doing so.

The girl who wrote to Steve had the nerve to write repeatedly “My deadline is tomorrow”, which more or less implies that Apple PR owe her some explanations. This is ridiculous – she should have expected no answer from them (based on their record) and worked on other ways to get the material she needed. Even more dumbfounding is the way she pretended that being an Apple customer and having a problem makes your problem an Apple customer issue. Is she stupid or is it intentional?

I am utterly surprised – to say the least – that Steve took the time to reply to such an obnoxious student. I can only find two explanations for this:

(a) it was a deliberate intention on his part to communicate that he wanted to be “left alone”* by people who email him all day thinking he’s at their service. Indeed, Steve obviously knows his emails are going to get published eventually, and therefore only replies when he wants to communicate something to the world, so to speak.

(b) the story is fake, and the girl (who is a student in journalism) used it to get attention, and, subsequently, “an A”.

*By the way “leave us alone” means “leave me alone.” This is a trait of Steve who often uses “we” when in fact he means “I”. This is in fact perhaps an indication that the email exchange is real. We’ll come back on this later.

UPDATE: this blog post on The Guardian pretty much sums up my opinion of this exchange.

UPDATE #2: another good one.

The full exchange below:

Dear Mr. Jobs,

As a college student, I can honestly say that Apple has treated me very well; my iPod is basically the lifeline that gets me through the day, and thanks to Apple’s Final Cut Pro, I aced last semester’s video editing project. I was planning to buy a new Apple computer to add to my list of Apple favorites.

Because I have had such good experiences as a college student using Apple products, I was incredibly surprised to find Apple’s Media Relations Department to be absolutely unresponsive to my questions, which (as I had repeatedly told them in voicemail after voicemail) are vital to my academic grade as a student journalist.

For my journalism course, I am writing an article about the implementation of an iPad program at my school, the CW Post Campus of Long Island University. The completion of this article is crucial to my grade in the class, and it may potentially get published in our university’s newspaper. I had 3 quick questions regarding iPads, and wanted to obtain answers from the most credible source: Apple’s Media Relations Department.

I have called countless times throughout the week, leaving short, but detailed, messages which included my contact information and the date of my deadline. Today, I left my 6th message, which stressed the increasingly more urgent nature of the situation. It is now the end of the business day, and I have not received a call back. My deadline is tomorrow.

Mr. Jobs, I humbly ask why Apple is so wonderfully attentive to the needs of students, whether it be with the latest, greatest invention or the company’s helpful customer service line, and yet, ironically, the Media Relations Department fails to answer any of my questions which are, as I have repeatedly told them, essential to my academic performance.

For colleges nationwide, Apple is at the forefront of improving the way we function in the academic environment, increasing the efficiency of conducting academic research, as well as sharing and communicating with our college communities.

With such an emphasis on advancing our education system, why, then, has Apple’s Media Relations team ignored my needs as a student journalist who is just trying to get a good grade?

In addition to the hypocrisy of ignoring student needs when they represent a company that does so much for our schools, the Media Relations reps are apparently, also failing to responsibly handle the inquiries of professional journalists on deadlines. Unfortunately, for a journalist in the professional world, lacking the answers they need on deadline day won’t just cost them a grade; it could cost them their job.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Chelsea Kate Isaacs

Senior

CW Post – Long Island University

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

Our goals do not include helping you get a good grade. Sorry.

Sent from my iPhone

emails from Steve