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Sorry, No Customer Service After 4:00 P.M.
By David Leonhardt
Why do all the best secrets come from little villages
high in the mountains.? Like how to destroy the very notion of
customer service, for example.
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A few months ago, I wrote about ingenious styles of customer
service that every business should know about, mostly because
their employees were inflicting them on their customers.
For instance, I warned about "in your face customer service" and
"run for cover customer service", two equally effective
opposites...like pouring too much sugar on your Cheerios one day,
and pouring too much cayenne pepper on them the next.
I also warned about "do-it-yourself-extortion", "consistent
filibuster customer service", "Invisible Man customer service",
"present-at-attendance customer service", "customer service on
steroids", and "satirical customer service".
You will have to read about these clever anti-sales pitches at:
http://www.thehappyguy.com/customer-service.html , because today
I want to tell you about a 100% revolutionary approach to
customer service that my wife and I discovered in a village high
up in the mountains.
We were on our annual honeymoon, a three-day escape from
parenthood to lick our wounds and give our tattered spirits a
chance to recuperate.
To tell the truth, the weekend was more like a marriage
encounter. It gave me a chance to find out just who is that
strange woman passing me in the hallway at full throttle,
pinching her nose and radiating the sweet smell of mushy diaper
as she whooshes past. And it gave her the chance to discover the
even stranger man who blows a muffled "Oof!" every time Little
Lady invents a new "Hop On Pop" dance move.
Check-in at the fairly expensive Resort-on-the-Edge-of-Nowhere
was 4:00 p.m., and it was made very clear that we would not be
welcome until then. It's always an ominous sign when a resort
begins by warning you when you will not be welcome, so we arrived
at 4:00 p.m..
At 6:30 we stopped by the front desk on the way to dinner to
request an additional pillow. Being in a sleep-related
establishment in, we figured there would an off-chance that this
request might be reasonable.
Wrong. The desk clerk could not provide a pillow because the
laundry department closed at 4:00, and he had no way of accessing
anything that was not right at the desk, he told us with a
deadpan face.
"But we were not allowed to check in until 4:00 p.m.," I
protested.
At this point, Deadpan Clerk pulled from under the desk a box big
enough to hold almost half a pillow, and started rummaging
helpfully through it to see if he could find a pillow. He could
not, he announced.
In the hospitality business, folks should know how to treat
people hospitably, or so I thought. If that were the case, I
suppose I would never have written about Hotel Stella and the
Wicked Witch of Lido ( http://www.thehappyguy.com/Hotel-
Stella.html ) or about the paper-thin walls in many hotels these
days ( http://www.thehappyguy.com/hotel-jokes.html ). OK, so the
latter was largely fiction, a desperate search for a column
topic, but the Hotel Stella torture story was 100% true.
Back at the fairly expensive Resort-on-the-Edge-of-Nowhere,
Deadpan Clerk proceeded to assure us that we were not the only
ones he mistreated. Phew, what a relief! In fact, just a few
minutes earlier a man had come looking for an iron for his wife
(probably for his wife's dress, as men rarely iron their wives,
but Deadpan Clerk never clarified that).
He proudly related how he had explained to the man that irons
were not available after 4:00 p.m., unless he had one in his
magic little box.
"But we were not allowed to check in until 4:00 p.m.," the man
protested.
He sent the man back to inform his wife that she will have to
attend the dinner theatre in a dress looking like a prune (the
dress, not the wife...at least, not that we were aware of).
NOTE: Although no missing persons report has been filed, we did
not see the man again.
Deadpan Clerk was proudly informed us that he had sent the man
away without an iron. Apparently we did not rank high enough to
deserve even their very worst customer service.
I should end this story on a happy note. But how? I escaped
alive, along with the strange woman I pass every day in the
hallway. It turns out she is my wife, go figure. And a most
compassionate wife, too...she even helped Deadpan Clerk escape
alive, too, at least until I return to the fairly expensive
Resort-on-the-Edge-of-Nowhere.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
David Leonhardt is a humor columnist:
http://www.TheHappyGuy.com/positive-thinking-free-ezine.html
Read more satirical articles and funny stories:
http://www.TheHappyGuy.com/humor articles.html
Read more personal growth articles:
http://www.TheHappyGuy.com/self-actualization-articles.html
Read more travel articles:
http://www.TheHappyGuy.comtravel-articles.html
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: (in HTML)
David Leonhardt is a href=http://www.TheHappyGuy.com/positive-thinking-free-
ezine.html>humor columnist. Read his href=http://www.TheHappyGuy.com/humor-articles.html>satirical
articles and funny stories, as well as his href=http://www.TheHappyGuy.com/self-actualization-articles.html>
personal growth library and his otherhref=http://www.TheHappyGuy.com/humor-articles.html>travel
articles.
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