Dear minister, here is the process we followed to build a complaint about our stay in a hotel in your country

Update: ICANN has pulled the complaint letter from its website. Another few hours well spent. Download it here.

One of the documents doing the rounds at the recent ICANN meeting in Dakar was an online survey about one of the hotels that community members - in this case the At Large community - were staying it.

By all accounts, the Hotel des Almadies was not an experience anyone would willingly pay for, in Dakar or anywhere else. A huge number of At Large people complained and were met with a variety of excuses but seemingly little action.

You could sense that many of the other community members - especially those not staying at the Almadies (probably better described as The Maladies) - wanted to point out that At Large members are not unknown for their ability to complain, even when their flights, room, food and drink are paid for them by ICANN, with a daily stipend on top. But they held off.

Even when they read of the complaint of "long dark unlit corridors" (complete with photo). Or when they were faced with the cruel fact that in one room "the lack of a TV remote made the TV unusable".

People stayed calm even when they learnt that "whilst some rooms had newly tiled floors, others had loose tiles". Through gritted teeth, the relevation that there were only three plugs - and no extension cables!!! - in the Internet room was almost too much to bear. But it was worse than that! The Internet room was nearly five minutes walk away!

A screengrab from the complaint. No, honestly.

But seemingly determined to make people bang their heads against the wall, ICANN's head of communications, Barbara Ann Clay, then leaps into the fray sending not only the hotel management but also the country's Communications Minister a long, complaining letter, accusing it of bringing down the good name of both ICANN and the entire country of Senegal, and asking for some kind of compensation. The letter was published on the ICANN site (and then pulled when it was noticed by a disbelieving community).

Clay: Focused. Just not on the right things

Adding to that over-the-top and self-important gesture, the letter then hilariously provides a rundown of the process used to gather complaints about the hotel, including quotes and references from ICANN Board resolutions and independent reviews.

While being suitably chastised, the hotel manager can now also reflect on the prowess displayed by his guests in formulating a policy to gather complaints about his business.

He should at least be grateful he wasn't included on the 'hotel-complaint-dakar-2011' mailing list and the series of 12 teleconference calls. And he only got to see the final complete version, rather than be requested to comment on all 19 drafts.

Presumably someone at some point in this process pointed out to Babs, as Head of Communications for ICANN, that the largest ever expansion of the Internet which is being entirely run by ICANN is due to open in JUST UNDER TWO MONTHS.

ICANN: getting its priorities right, one priority at a time.