February 22, 2002

Dear Sir or Madam:

Enclosed is a past due notice for an invoice dated January 10^th, 2002.

To clarify the service that you were invoiced for, here is an excerpt from page 130 of my novel, Everyone In Silico:

Doug removed the razor with its Coke-bottle-shaped hole in the middle and chopped up a few lines, partly obscuring the “Coke goes better with Coke” tagline. The promo item had come with a straw, too, but it’d been lost years ago, so Doug had to carefully snort with his bare nostril.

Although I am disappointed that your company has not immediately understood how revolutionary product placement in novels will be, I understand that in a company as big as Coca Cola, miscommunications are par for the course. Sometimes it’s just like a big game of telephone, isn’t it?

For instance, I was reading recently that trade union leaders in the United States are suing you for allegedly hiring right-wing death squads to terrorise workers at its Colombian bottling plant. Something about five union leaders at the plant dying under mysterious circumstances since 1995. As soon as I read that, I was like, this is a classic miscommunication and nothing more.

I can imagine exactly how it went down: someone from the Columbia bottling plant calls an executive in Atlanta about a problem he’s having -- an employee that’s rabble rousing. The executive, naturally enough, just said, “Well, terminate him.”

In light of your current situation, I’ll allow you another thirty days to pay the invoice.

You’re welcome,

Jim Munroe.

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