Who is it exactly that does the regretting?

[Speck Tater]

I had a small personal loan with a local finance company which was recently bought out by a large national company. I received a letter from them informing me of the new address that I should send my payemnts to.

The letter said "We regret any inconvience this change may cause for you."

Now that got me wondering. Exactly who is it that is feeling that regret? Certainly the CEO of this national company is too busy to actually waste time in doing the regretting, and I'm sure the folks in the mailroom that proces the incoming payments don't even know that there is anything to be regretted when they open my envelope.

So, do you suppose the company hires a professional regretter? Maybe the regretter sits in his office waiting for a memo from headquarters about what he should feel regret for today. I guess with as many customers as they have he could probably only allocate a minute or two of regret for my particular case, but at least that would be something.

Somehow I suspect, though, that in fact there is nobody in that company who actually feels any regret over the situation, and that this corporation is actually lying to me when they say "We regret..."

[BigMcLargehuge]

1. it's all handled by software now

Microsoft Regret 1.0

I hear it's a resource hog

[aden_nak]

2. It's all legalities.

See, now, corperations have all the same rights as an individual citizen. It stands to reason, therefore, that the corperation AS AN ENTITY might be feeling the actual regret. This would be hard to verify, of course, but it seems the most likely.