CUSTOMER SERIVCE

The article stated that 67 percent of 1000 people polled had customer service issues.

Although I am of the age to have grown up watching customer service happen to my parents, children were not recognized as customers. It wasn't they were rude, we just weren't recognized even if our 10 cent purchase was money spent.

After all, if Mrs. Anderson could go to Penney's and spend a nickel on a spool of thread and be treated with please and thank you, why couldn't a group of happy girls get that sort of treatment at the Fountain Cafe for Cokes all around? Hey if Evonne was along, there was even a bill for French Fries--bring the mustard. Yvonne?

And no matter what we are told, we are still responsible for every nit nit we do. And small towns don't forget or don't let you whereas, one should not be held liable for decades. Regardless if it is good or bad.

Manners, whether I meant them or not, were drilled into me. DRILLED. You WILL say please and thank you. And so I did. And decades later, at my mother's funeral, a lady who worked at the Fountain came up to me and said, "Oh, Elodee, I am so sorry your mother has passed". She went on to say she remembered me from the Fountain and I was always nice to her.

And the funny thing about it is, she glared at us. She appeared to glare at us. Who knows what was going through her mind. But we were not privileged to full citizenship. And, as a teen, I didn't give any thought to what she may be going through. I don't think I wondered anything except glaring, or appear to be glaring was certainly not part of being a waitress.

It was many years before the DRILLED came back to me in the form of a German Baptist owner. Customer Service was top billing and all of his staff would be loving that person regardless. It wasn't hard, the people where worth it. My private life was not at work. I was not paid to bring it to work.

The biggest complaint in the survey I read was about tech support. I am inclined to believe we can blame a runny BM on them. It is all their fault. It is all the computer's fault. And, it may be but where is the follow up?

I tend to chew on things awhile before I spit it out. But when I went to have a physical and someone had keyed in the information on a new computer system saying my dad died because of heart surgery, it really pissed me off. He died because they gave him blood with the AIDS virus in it. The nurse didn't have a pen so she wrote numbers in a magic marker. The doctor couldn't access the computer to write RX. There was no follow up to squelch damage control. It was all the fault of the computer, right? WRONG!

But customer service is coming back! Employees are saying please and thank you. Why? Why is it that after shopping for greater than 10 years at a up scale department store in FM area I have only once been asked if they could help me? Bucks. Someone had caught on that servicing your customers is not a novel idea, it is what service is all about.

I am enlightened. I am aglow. A man who is retired fixes rods. He is customer oriented. FINALLY.

e