I don't think the attitude in the first several paragraphs, wishing harm to the pump engineers etc, can lead to a good discussion.
Honestly, I found it illuminating. I don’t depend on a machine to keep me alive directly, but it made me think about how much I would resent dangling at the end of a line held by a company that would cut me off if investors thought it would make them slightly richer. One that cuts every corner they can, and doesn’t actually care about you. I imagine that resentment over years, a quarter century of things getting worse on the “caring whether you live or die” front, might lead to the feelings the author expressed.
It’s pretty clear that discussion is not desired, unless you have the cure for type 1 diabetes in hand before you send the first reply.
I appreciate it when someone recognizes that they're struggling with conflict and emotion, and lets me know that they know this. It's better to acknowledge the emotion and put it on the table as its own valid topic of discussion, than to tiptoe around it or try the "I'm sensing that you're dealing with some internal conflict" approach that risks embarrassing them or worsening it.
The choice is whether to acknowledge the emotion, not whether to have it.
Personally, when anger is justified, I feel more comfortable with people who clearly and openly express it.
I find them more reliable, more honest, and usually better people to be around.
By my standards, I'd even consider the style very mild, considering a life is on the line.
I would also consider it normal to be on the receiving end of such language if my own work resulted in such a situation. That would cause me to pause and reflect.
The intensity of feedback is information. If everything is bland, it's harder to know how important something is or not. Logic has a limit because you don't have all the parameters from the other side.
It works the other way around. The overuse of superlatives and day-to-day outrage is equally unproductive.
This is not the case here, IMO.
The thing that's really bugging me is that this is not what happened at all!
"I'm not at home, please send the new pump to my hotel."
That's it! That solves the entire problem in 5 seconds plus the time to tell the customer service rep the hotel's address and verify it's correct. Yeah, there were some other structural problems that led to other dumb things, but none of that would have even come up if she'd done the blindingly obvious thing and had the life-saving, 24/7-required device shipped to her actual location. If anyone endangered her life, it was her, through her own actions.
She really crossed the line for me by wishing harm on the people who designed and built her insulin pump. What the hell? They've done nothing wrong. Yes, her pump was beginning to fail, but 1) it was still limping along with a workaround and she wasn't in immediate danger (and if it did fully fail, she said she was within an hour's drive of an ER at all times, which she felt was fine), and 2) she had never had a pump problem in twenty-five years, which is an amazing testament to the reliability of these devices. The people who work on these things deserve a freakin' medal, not bullshit like "the people who design, sell, and service these machines are both keeping me alive and also my mortal enemies".
I understand different regions have different communication style, but the murder rate in the US is too high for us to joke about these sorts of things.
It may not be written with that intent, but if you publish something publicly on the internet, you run the risk of some people, somewhere, discussing what you wrote.
That doesn't mean you have to care what those people have to say. Frankly, she shouldn't care what we have to say.
But if you put something out there, and someone reads it, they're well within their rights to have whatever reaction they want to it.
Re: "being nice for the sake of niceties", I agree with you, but her attitude toward the people who work for the pump manufacturer (who did nothing wrong, and in aggregate built life-saving devices so reliable that it took a quarter of a century before her first problem came up) is just not ok. "Beyond the pale" is a phrase that comes to mine, and I don't think I'm being hyperbolic here.
Those of us without a medical dependency are lucky that catching one of the many tech failures modes won't actually kill us - but you'll still want to throttle more than a few folks if you ever have to recover from your Google/Apple ID getting banned, or PayPal running off with all your money, etc.
(Not above criticism, of course, but weird to lump them together as insidious "tech companies").
You can't have a reasonable customer relation with any corporation when you are a captive audience - let alone one when they could kill you at any moment, whether from negligence or plain indifference.
This plays out in less-lethal versions all over tech. Do you dare redeem that Apple Gift Card your aunt gave you for your birthday, knowing that Apple might nuke your whole digital identity from orbit[1]?