Service With a (Fake) Smile - Page 2

Inauthentically Bad Service
On the bad side of the ledger, however, the stories flooded in. And they did tend to group themselves according to my diagram. Those falling into the inauthentic/bad quadrant I came to think of as the Kafka experiences, which arise when you are trapped in routines much larger than any individual. I was myself once waylaid for 17 hours in Amsterdam by Air Transat due to a mechanical problem. As Skipol closed around us, tedium mounted to anxiety. We came pretty close to a lynching when passengers overheard the pilot on a lounge payphone negotiating the purchase of a used part with Royal Jordanian Air.

Indeed, customer service experiences involving phones really loomed large in this group. My (very stubborn) friend John stayed on hold with Rogers for 1 1/2 hours when his Internet went down. His mood won't have been improved by the reminder, every 15 seconds, that one could also email for technical support. Um, not without Internet access you can't. Amazon went so far as to keep their customer service phone numbers secret. An investigative journalist from Slate had to actually break the story when the number was found (800-201-7575). And the phone companies got it from all sides. Fido insisted my friend must have dropped his phone when the screen didn't work right out of the box. Customer service put him on hold and then disconnected him. He finally went and traded the phone for a new one as part of a Telus promotion. But then, when another friend switched from Telus to Shaw, they just kept billing her. That one took a mere 40 minutes on hold to sort out.


Authentically Bad Service
In the upper left quadrant of my T.O.E. diagram you find experiences that are less Kafkaesque and—being more personal and spontaneous—feel more like getting mugged. I had a guy in a dollar store go to pocket my change (five and coins) when I responded "No" to "Do you need this?" Call me crazy but I thought he was talking about a plastic bag. Then there was the Granville bus driver who ignored the guy running up the sidewalk to catch us. He pulled away when the runner was a foot from the door. Then the driver really made it personal when, in stop-and-go traffic, he burned the guy at more stops south of Georgia. The runner finally caught us at Davie. Shouting ensued. I recall something like: "You're a bus driver! You're supposed to stop at the stops!"

Several Authentic/Bad stories came in on the topic of health services (where everything good or bad is personal). I liked the one about the relationship counsellor falling in love with my friend Cathy's partner. Cathy would speak and the counsellor would roll his eyes. Her boyfriend would speak and the counsellor would lean forward, rapt. Go on, Joe. What happened next? Much less comical, however, was the mole on a friend's arm which her doc had been sagely "monitoring" for three years. Good thing she finally got that second opinion from a dermatologist and was whisked immediately into surgery.

Movers are a personal, authentic kind of service, too. Hey, it's your stuff. My friend Helen moved to the Island using a small local outfit. "They did look a lot like convicts," she recalls. But that didn't prepare her—at the far end, while unloading—for the arrival of eight paramedics. Nobody could figure out who had called 911 until they heard the moans from the bathroom where one of the movers had OD'd.

Another friend, Zane, had a moving day so spectacularly, authentically horrible that Adam Sandler is optioning it for his next film (not really, but he should). Zane was moving his stuff to Mainland Mini Storage, having negotiated by phone for a locker big enough for a "small apartment." AJK Moving showed up to do the deed, whereupon the following things happened in unfairly quick succession. Elevator breaks. Hungover mover guy quits, leaves truck but takes keys. New mover arrives, completes move to storage depot where my friend finds a 4-by-6-foot locker waiting for him. ("Small apartment must have come out large aquarium," he muses now.) New locker located two blocks way at Alderbridge Mini Storage. Mover jumps into his truck and drives off, frantically eager to please my terminally stressed-out friend, only leaving him behind in the process. Two blocks, no big deal. He walks over. If only the mover hadn't driven half way to Aldergrove, B.C., before thinking to call for clarification.

There were a number of Authentic/Bad stories distinguished by individual initiative on the part of the service providers. It's no accident service sucked, in these cases. Somebody devoted real effort to make it so. I put my friend Kevin's tux rental outfit in this category. They kept his deposit even when he phoned to cancel the order. Standing in front of a warehouse holding approximately 5,000 tuxedos, the owner claimed that Kevin's tux had to be shipped in from Italy. Just his. Why? Well, because Kevin was so average-size that they could never keep it in stock.
My friend Karen's experience at MAC cosmetics also falls into this category. One of the Goth gals who worked there handed her liquid eyeliner samples, watching disinterestedly while Karen painted test stripes up and down her forearm. When scrubbing failed to remove these stripes, indeed reddened and chafed her skin, the Goth consented to explain that this particular liquid eyeliner didn't come off for three days. Pause. More scrubbing. Unless, you know, maybe Karen wanted to use this oil remover they had behind the counter.

Karen: "Well, do you think I could possibly have some of that oil?"

Goth: "If you want."

The Three Honk Rule and the Good-Bad Service Anomaly
As a social scientist, I'm honour bound to acknowledge in closing a couple of aberrant phenomena that seem to defy the explanatory power of my Customer Service Theory of Everything. There is no explaining, for example, spontaneously bad customer service that
people somehow love. Coffee With Attitude (in White Rock), for example, has a legendarily abrasive proprietor who is nevertheless so loved by patrons that they do things like lend her their condos in Hawaii. The old Delilah's had a similar feel. I recall learning that Amex wasn't accepted when the waiter dropped my card to the floor and screamed down at it: "Icky poo-poo card! Icky poo-poo card!" It is similarly difficult to explain authentic local places that provide bad customer service with a wink, as if it's understood that we like it. If you've ever been called "bitch" at the Elbow Room Café, you know what I mean.

But the final anomalous grouping we must address involves those bad customer service experiences for which we, the customers, must take responsibility. I have a Three Honk Rule, which holds that if I use the car horn more than twice on any given trip it actually must be me driving like a bone-head and creating the crappy experience, not other drivers.

And I think it's a customer service variant of the Three Honk Rule that explains the tragic loss of my all-time favourite bar in Vancouver. Mulvaney's at Granville Island used to have this perfect little joint on the main floor called the Creole. It was so tiny, and so removed from Mulvaney's management upstairs, that the patrons seemed to run the place. There used to be this routine called "the splash," where you'd get about a half a pint free if, by chance, you'd paid your bill and finished your last pint but were still in the middle of a conversation. "Hey, can I just get a splash down here?" I don't think I ever left the Creole without having one or two splashes.
Eventually, of course, scandalously low beer prices started to creep up. And we all complained and signed a petition. And the management backed off. And the splashes continued. And the prices rose again and a new petition was circulated. And this whole process continued like some protracted union negotiation until they finally closed the place. It's called The Sandbar now. And, like Bean Around the World, I won't set foot in there. But unlike Bean Around the World, nobody threatened to shoot my dog, and the whole fiasco might just be my own fault.

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