The viral email from the most disappointed father on earth

In a letter to his grown children, a British father signs off, &quot;I am bitterly, bitterly disappointed. Dad.&quot;

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last updated 10 January 2015

Parents expressing disappointment in their children is common enough in the annals of human history, but Nick Crews, a retired officer of the British Royal Navy, may take the prize as the most embittered father to have ever walked this miserable earth. In a scathing email that has gone viral across the pond (and which is only now making the rounds in the U.S.), Crews chastises his three adult children for wallowing in utter fecklessness and incompetence, and jeopardizing the future happiness of his grandchildren. Says Crews:

With last evening's crop of whinges and tidings of more rotten news for which you seem to treat your mother like a cess-pit, I feel it is time to come off my perch.

Why has the email gone viral in Britain? "Many parents are apparently delighted that someone finally had the gumption to give at least one set of overprivileged slackers a well-deserved kick in the pants," says David Brooks at The New York Times, making "Crews a hugely popular folk hero." His children reportedly frittered away their first-class educations, and repaid their parents by ceaselessly complaining about their privileged lives. The Crews children's "broken marriages and feckless lack of drive" is a theme that "just happens to be a burning subtext to Europe's monumental blahs," says David Monagan at Forbes.