A clay tablet from the ancient Sumerian city-state of Ur in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) is the oldest known case of a written customer complaint.
In the detailed message, a man named Nanni griped to a merchant about being delivered the wrong grade of copper ore.
“How have you treated me for that copper?” Nanni wrote on the nearly 3,800-year-old tablet. “You have withheld my money bag from me in enemy territory; it is now up to you to restore [my money] to me in full.” (The entire message is translated below).
Nanni engraved his complaint in the Akkadian language, which is one of the oldest forms of writing. Quartz notes that the “amount of effort required to make [the engraving] gets across the magnitude of Nanni’s grievance.” Yahoo Finance’s Myles Udland, speaking on the Final Round, saw a modern parallel.
“You get to live one life and right now we’ll probably be alive for 80 years,” Udland says in the video above. “But the only thing that might survive from that would be you complaining about your 311 call that goes unresolved. … In 100 years, the New York City 311 line or whatever is going to say, ‘Oh, I remember when this woman called to complain about the fire hydrant on Amsterdam.'”
Historian A. Leo Oppenheim provided a translation of the ancient tablet in his 1967 book “Letters From Mesopotamia: Official, Business, and Private Letters on Clay Tablets from Two Millennia”:
Tell Ea-nasir: Nanni sends the following message: