Racism is as Racism does.

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Dear Debbie,

In ref: to your letter of September 14^th.

First of all, please let me say thank you for the contract cancellation acknowledgement and the promptness of your response.

There are countless accounts on the internet of this not being forthcoming and membership to the gym being continued regardless of cancellation letter, so I was pleased to find this not the case.

However I was still more than a little perplexed by the nature of your response. And as I am until the end of October, still a paying customer (or hostage as I have come to call it) I feel compelled to respond.

In your letter you have sent me a photo copy of my contract explaining the 10 day cooling off period and how the membership cancellation process works and that it is in the contract.

I did not dispute this.

My complaint was that I was lied to by staff at the point of sale, something that you seem spectacularly unimpressed by. I enclose a photo copy of the conversation that will display how I was cajoled into a position where I did not feel the need to go through the contract with a fine tooth comb to ensure that I was not being duped into a position where I would need to pay for 2 months membership that I had no need whatsoever for, (or I would have enclosed it if it was empirically possible to do so).

I also highlighted that Fitness First do not HAVE to hold customers to the contractual letter of the law. I was implying that whilst I would see the September payment as something that Fitness First should expect to collect in the circumstances, the fact that I requested the cancellation of the October payment only a day or two late, one would think, given the total lack of impact on the Fitness First institution, that they would see that their staff had behaved inappropriately at the point of sale and consider making a concession.

The majestic nature of the concession would have resulted in a placated customer who now understood the contracts cancellation policy in full and could re-join the gym fully informed when it was next possible to attend, as was my initial goal.

You however decided to respond to the more inflammatory remarks in my letter by accusing them of being ‘tantamount to racism’. This to my ear, is a spectacularly ill considered statement.

My statements were deliberately absurd in order to stress just how ugly I consider the manner in which Fitness First has dealt with my complaint. It seems to me that I have met with behaviour that can be directly analogised with facist policing techniques, and I used an extended analogy to imply that to have staff as belligerent and aggressively jobsworth as the ones I have encountered, that you must have to put them through some humanity devolving tasks to find them.

Wherein lies the racism I ask you?

Please retract the statement or explain it, I am happy with either.

At present your suggestion that your paying customer is a racist for suggesting that you employ Nazi’s seems to me only to be racist if:

a)      All Fitness First staff are German

b)      All Fitness First staff are generally assumed to be Germans by common perception

c)      You are a German

If any of these are the case, then please accept my formal apologies as I do not consider the German nation to have Nazi inclination, but I DO consider the methods and behaviour of Fitness First to have similarities in approach to complaint.

Otherwise, I do not consider your previous letter a tackling of the complaint issues that I have raised, though once again, thank you for the cancellation acknowledgement.

Please tell me in what context my remarks are racist, as I am currently under the impression that you, without cause, have sent a paying customer a letter calling them a racist……….

Yours truly,

Alex Lewis.