Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Egg on My Face

Well, I'm going to admit to having a fair bit of egg on my face this morning, Bush. I'm talking about that cell phone store. First off, having been so smug about having proved the techie's disgnosis wrong, and walking out of the store with our cellphone seemingly in working order... it ceased to function again almost immediately. Oh, we did manage to coax a couple of calls out of it, but then it started to go haywire again, and by this morning it was pretty much dead to the world. On our way into town to indulge in our weekly nightmare of real estate and contractor business, Ellie's phone rang. It worked well enough to hear that the call came from the real estate office, but not well enough to communicate in intelligible words. Thinking it could be important, we left the freeway to look for a pay phone. A pay phone, Bush, if you can imagine! So 1980s! And hard to find these days. Anyway, it wasn't the important.

Later, though, we did stop by another Verizon shop and the young people couldn't have been nicer or more attentive to our needs. We had three of them helping us make decisions about which new phone to choose, and walking us through a lot of the technical stuff that had mystified us before. So I was wrong to have implied, as I did yesterday, that all Verizon stores are incompetent and uncaring. I offer my apologies to Verizon for my false assumptions, along with this correction.

All of which leads me to reflect, Bush, that we can all make mistakes sometimes. I know how hard it is to admit it, especially when they're big ones which involve an awful lot of people. I won't bug you today by reminding you which of yours I'm hinting at, but you might just want to reflect a little on the subject of making mistakes, and recognizing it, and making up for them in some concrete way. The fact is, you feel much better when you've had he guts and the wisdom to do your make-up. Not that my trivial little experience means much at all. It's just that... well, I want the best for you.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Peter, it's become rare, and therefore a great pleasure, to find competent people to help you out when you go to a store. Probably a lot of reasons for that, but I think most of it comes down to short-term bottom line thinking on the part of people who run many businesses. I always prefer going to a good old-fashioned hardware store rather than enduring the Home Depot experience. Or going to a book store where the clerks actually read.