300 Posts and One Gripe

According to the helpful counter on my dashboard page, this will be my 300th post since I started keeping this blog in March of 2006. Since I installed the ClusterMaps counter in January, some 1112 people have visited the site, and many have left comments (only one of which has been offensive).

I hope that visitors enjoy reading this blog as much as I enjoy posting to it. I'm a pretty opinionated person with strong opinions on almost everything, but I like to think I also have an open mind. Except on some things...

Yesterday, I took a half-day of leave from work to wait at home for a repair crew to come and troubleshoot a problem with our water system. As usual, I was given a "window" of 1 to 6 PM for them to arrive, which is irritating, but pretty much normal around here. By 5:00 I was starting to wonder when they would arrive, as I had other errands I needed to run...not to mention a Mount Everest of laundry I didn't want to start doing in case they would need to turn off the water. I called the company and spoke with a young lady, who called the crew, then called me back to tell me they were running very late because of a job that turned out to be bigger than expected. The lady told me she was very sorry, and the crew would still make it to my house...but it would be about another two hours.

By 8:15 PM, no one had shown up and no one had called to update me on the situation. I called the company again but, of course, it was closed, so I was reduced to leaving a message of irritation.

At 9:00 PM I gave up.

Now, those of you who own businesses in which you require your customers to wait for you to arrive during time windows, take note. This fiasco cost me a half-day of work I couldn't really afford. At 1:00, I was grudgingly accepting of the need to wait on the repair crew. At 5:00, I was irritated, but prepared to be understanding. At 8:15, I was pissed off.

And it didn't need to be this way. It would have been polite and customer-oriented to have someone call me as soon as it was obvious that the crew would be excessively delayed...this would have allowed me to do other things instead of sit around the house on my ever-broadening backside waiting for a crew that, in the end, never showed up and never called to apologize and reschedule. If you're a business owner who thinks about maintaining good customer relations (as you should), consider this a cautionary tale. It wouldn't have taken more than two minutes to call me with an update, and I would have appreciated the gesture and been more understanding.

Today, I'm just a very angry customer waiting to hear what they have to say about the situation. If they call me back.

I'll let you know how it turns out.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo