On email

Most spanish websites, when they are working, have some sort of contact option on them. Usually one of the choices is email. Now I like email because it gives me time to prepare the question in Spanish. The replies too are easier to understand as there is time to study them. Well I suppose they would be except that I've never had a reply so that has to be pure supposition.

Sometimes the emails yield results. My bank repaid a mistaken charge as the result of an email but they never wrote back or acknowledged receipt of it. In fact, one time I went to the branch about a week after emailing. I asked the chap why he hadn't responded. He looked in his inbox, found my email and said that he never read his emails as he was too busy.

I had a brief skirmish with my credit card company when they reduced my credit limit drastically without mentioning it and for no good reason. I would email and they would ring me on my mobile. The fact of clicking on the box marked "email" in the section asking how I would like my response never made any difference.

I think that not responding to email has something to do with the Internet still being relatively underused in Spain, something to do with poor customer care, because Spaniards like to talk and because keeping information to yourself seems to be something of a Spanish obsession.