The curator of the Sherlock Holmes Museum has sparked outrage on social media by suggesting job applicant Rachel Fox was "lazy" and "selfish" for requesting more details about a vacancy.
Fox posted the response from museum creator Andrea von Ehrenstein, writing: "After enquiring about a job vacancy they had listed and requesting further details I am told I am lazy and selfish."
Ehrenstein told the job applicant: "You have to think first whether we might want to answer all your questions even supposing we had the time."
"The first thing is to send your CV to an employer and then ask questions if the employer is at all interested in you. You are putting yourself first in life instead of thinking about what the other person might want from you.
"We are not interested in a series of questions from a person who cannot be bothered to include their own CV in their enquiry. It sounds very much like you are simply working for a recruitment agency."
On trying to reply to Ehrenstein's message, Fox wrote that she was left "speechless" to discover that her email had been "blocked and reported as spam."
Twitter users flocked to her defence, with Matt Wilcox writing that the museum creator was "doing an excellent job of damaging their own business... by being lazy and selfish!".
Another user, Betsy, said the curator's response was "shockingly bad". She added: "And "yours sincerely" is making me laugh when an offer to "assist further" is anything but."
Fox originally wrote to the Museum, which is at the famous detective's address of 221b Baker Street in London, asking for more details about a retail staff post and for a "slightly more detailed job specification".
The fine arts graduate from Nottingham Trent University later wrote that the response she got was "so rude" and quipped: "If anything, I totally dodged a bullet with that one. Glad to not work there!"
Patrick Woodman, head of external affairs at the Chartered Management Institute, told HuffPostUK: “This isn’t the first time that a manager has been wrong-footed by the power of social media – just remember when the energy companies announced price rises recently – and it won’t be the last.
"In fact, CMI’s research shows that two-thirds of today’s managers today admit they don’t know how to use social media effectively. New technology creates brilliant opportunities, but this story is a reminder that reputations can be badly damaged in the blink of an eye.”