Dear Madam!In response to your request, I am explaining the doubts, leaving the assessment of my reliability and yours to the Readers:- the whole matter concerned your taking into account the request of an ill client and refunding the money for a blood-pressure monitor that was unfit for use. The matter could have been settled in this way, as I confirmed even at another pharmacy and at the Pharmaceutical Inspectorate in Jelenia Góra. It depended solely on goodwill, and therefore on your kindness;- we received the description of the situation at the pharmacy and the request for help from Mrs Stańczuk’s sister;- to check whether such a situation had actually occurred, I personally called you and asked you to consider the complaint “on the spot”. You refused to grant the request, not very politely but quite firmly;- the editorial office of every publication has not only the right but also the duty to express its opinions on behalf of the Readers, especially when it is necessary to defend the “weaker party”, moreover an ill person who no longer has any other avenue of intervention (Mrs Stańczuk’s sister told us that you had even advised her to go to President Wałęsa himself, while you would still stand by your position. I believed her words after my telephone conversation with you);- Mrs Elżbieta Stańczuk is not a “so-called” Elżbieta Stańczuk, but a real person who purchased a defective blood-pressure monitor from you. It is true that she did not buy it herself, but that her husband did so for her—but is that the most important issue here? After all, this is the only basis on which you can accuse me of falsifying facts, and you even threaten me with legal consequences. In what other respect am I unreliable and untruthful? And what explanations are you demanding from the editorial team?- the complaint submitted by a “completely different person” (her husband) was not settled at all (as you write) in the “most appropriate manner”, because this “completely different person” did not wait two weeks (as some bureaucrat from the state-run trade sector came up with), but an entire month for the refund, visiting your pharmacy on 7 and 23 November and 2, 3 and 5 December;- here the “completely different person” did indeed write a statement at your pharmacy because he finally wanted to recover his money. Recover it, not “extort” it, as you write and additionally emphasize;- in accusing you of a lack of kindness, I was guided mainly by the fact that only here and perhaps in some of the former “Eastern Bloc countries” is the consumer treated in a bureaucratic manner and made to feel that he is receiving a great favour when he asserts his rights. Following your own advice, I even sought “professional advice from journalistic experts” from the magazine “VETO” on this matter. I was told that a consumer should receive a refund immediately for defective goods, and that the arrangements between the owner and wholesalers need not concern the consumer. In this case, moreover, it concerned an ill person who had neither the device nor the money for an entire month;- as for the editorial office’s contribution to the medical treatment costs of Bolesławiec residents, I would like to remind you that last year, together with the Social Committee for the Purchase of an Ultrasound Machine, through our DAR SERCA campaign, we donated medical equipment worth more than 750 million złotys to the hospital, and currently the Readers are helping us collect funds to purchase a laparoscope;- I assure you that the note was intended neither to increase the readership of “Głos...” nor to harm the pharmacy. Please recall how, during our telephone conversation, I offered the pharmacy free advertising or a “warm” article about kindness at Fabian’s in exchange for a humane approach to Mrs S...’s case. The sole purpose of my note was to bring about a situation in our town in which people would be kind to one another, at least in the future. By treating human problems callously, you are harming your own pharmacy the most;- in my note, signed with the editorial abbreviation of my first and last name (I am not the only one who uses this in journalistic practice), I did not use an epithet or expression intended to insult you. However, some of the expressions you used in several places, in my opinion, depart somewhat from the principles of good manners and certainly do not harmonize with your master’s degree.Franciszek Uściński, Master of Polish Philology