Virgin Trains respond to complaint about sexism… with more sexism

Well alright, then.

There are plenty of ways to respond to a customer complaint about sexist language. Some people offer their apologies and ensure that such an incident will not occur again. Others ask the customer to detail exactly what happened so they can attempt to right the situation. And the remaining few... well, they respond with some more sexist language because why not, that won't backfire at all in the realm of the World Wide Web. Except it does. Intensely. Earlier today, Virgin Trains customer Emily Cole took it upon herself to complain to a male train manager about something. According to her, he dismissed her complaint "with that hideously patronising word women shudder at in contexts such as these: 'honey.'" Emily then decided to take her complaint elsewhere - Twitter. However, the person who was managing the Virgin Trains Twitter account failed to see any issue and responded with their own patronising, sexist comment. https://twitter.com/EmilyLucindaRC/status/948126034502746112 Lovely. Emily, understandably, was not all that impressed so she decided to out 'MS' by screenshotting their response and posting it herself. Many Twitters users were also not too taken by the employee's response. "Incredibly rude and snarky response to a perfectly reasonable complaint," said one person. "After 20 years in the UK, I am hard-pressed to think of it as native to any region here, I assumed it was patronising," rationalised another.

Yup. It was obviously inappropriate. Context matters, even where there might be regionally acceptable words. If he’d called me ‘mate’ as I was complaining it would have been inappropriate. But obviously this is worse.

— Joe Cannon #FBPE (@JoeCannonLondon) January 2, 2018

The company's tweet has since been deleted and Virgin Trains have issued an apology. They said:

"We apologise unreservedly for this tweet and any offence that it may have caused. To avoid causing more offence we have deleted the original post."