(Please recall that the title of this blog features the word, “whine”...)
Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon recently, or has it been going on for a while and I’m only just later than everyone else at becoming aware of it?:
1. A few days ago, I was in a drug store with a bag of Miss Vicky’s potato chips in hand. As I plopped it onto the counter beside the cashier, she picked it up, brandished it and exclaimed, “Ohhhh... GREAT choice! These are my FAVOURITE chips! I used to only eat the plain but then I discovered their cheddar and onion flavour. Have you tried THOSE?”
2. In a restaurant setting, after I deliver my choice to the waiter / waitress / gender neutral table attendant, he / she will look at me and say something like, “Excellent choice! You are REALLY going to enjoy that! It’s what I usually have when I eat here.”
The common thread here is my being complimented – beyond a typical word of acknowledgement or confirmation, actually praised – for making the choice I did. It’s been happening for a few months in restaurants, but the drug store praise for a flipping bag of chips made me wonder if something new is afoot in the retail / service industry.
You can almost imagine a market share consultant a few years back sitting down trying to find some way to push his or his company’s name to the top of the consultancy heap. “I’ve got it!” he yelled late one night after it came to him in a dream – “Don’t just serve the customer. Make him feel that he’s shining out like a lighthouse beacon from among all the other dimbulbs in the room. Make him feel that your entire staff has just been waiting all day for someone to walk through the door and make exactly THAT choice!”
Because in recent weeks there’ve been times when customer servers enthusiastically have tried to make me feel as though I were Indiana Jones right after he picked the correct Grail.
“Scrambled eggs and BROWN toast for breakfast, sir? That’s our SPECIALTY! The chef just LOVES to make scrambled eggs. Not only that, we just got a FRESH loaf of brown bread. You are SO going to enjoy your breakfast!”
And so I’m trying to work up some way I can bounce it back the next time it happens. “EXCELLENT choice, sir, you are really going to enjoy that!...” (Me / fortissimo voce): “Oh I DO hope so. Because the last time I tried it, I had to be rushed to the hospital about an hour after I got home with what the crew in emergency called the severest case of ptomaine poisoning they’d ever seen. They asked me where I’d eaten last. I just pretended I couldn’t remember the name – but if it happens again, you can be sure I won’t just tell them, I’ll send a note to every local dining out in Canada’s Capital blog on the whole damned Internet! Oh, and could I please have another Alexander Keith’s Red Amber**? Thank you so much.”
Might even get a beer on the house.
(** Although rather schizophrenically named, Alexander Keith’s Red Amber Ale is excellent. Full-flavoured but not overpowering, it’s an outstanding way to launch a meal. Especially if you’re blessed with a purveyor who provides it on draught.)
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In my last entry, you may recall I was in search of the difference between “among” and “amongst”. Well, since I have still a dictionary readily to hand, I checked, and sure enough, one definition of “skinny” is: “confidential information about a topic or person; for example, ‘he wanted the inside skinny on the new partner’”.
I mention that simply to issue here and now, even though it is only (at this writing) still relatively early in December, a loud and immediate call for a ban on any further use of the word “skinny” in headlines on diet-related stories.
(Why yes, since you ask, I wrote that after having just read yet another, “The skinny on diets” headline over one more of the type of story that masochistic line-up editors seem to feel should be published in the run-up to the coming holiday.)
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It’s an easy shot to whack away at the rampant consumerism that pretty well defines “Christmas” from about mid-November to the end of the year (and beyond, for those cutting-edge merchants who have introduced January as “Boxing Month”). So it’s a genuine treat to be able to bring to y’all a good news story of a wholly unexpected random act of generosity I observed recently while sitting in a most unlikely setting – the seat of a homeward-bound OCTranspo bus.
I noticed, a few stops after I had boarded, that the driver was in conversation with another passenger who had just boarded. From what I heard, it was clear that the little machine that issues paper transfers had stopped working. (OCTranspo – in common with most large city transit services – has a structure that will let you pay only once and still be able to change routes, if required, to get you to where you want to go, perhaps even through more than one change of bus, but only so long as you have a paper transfer ticket issued by the driver of the first bus you got on. The transfers do have a time limit, but it is a generous one. Plus you can’t use them to travel the reverse direction on the same route. So don’t plan on using the transfer you were issued in the morning to carry you home at the end of the day.)
When another passenger boarded with cash, I watched as the driver actually placed his hand over the coin box. I didn’t hear exactly what he said, but from the passenger’s bemused expression, it was pretty clear the driver had refused to take his money, and instructed him to pay at the next bus he boarded, where he would then receive a transfer if he needed one. But what elevated this simple act from logical business to unexpected generosity was that the driver did this for every cash-paying or ticket-using customer who boarded, never even bothering to ask if he or she was going to request a transfer.
So OC Transpo undoubtedly lost a few shekels for the time that the broken transfer printer sat on a bus in service, but I suspect what they gained in surprised riders’ good will is of considerably more value than the few lost dollars they lost in unpaid fares.
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And finally, here’s the lead sentence from a CTV.ca news item, December 5:
"Calgary's Catholic School Board is pulling 'The Golden Compass' from school shelves -- a children's fantasy novel that criticizes strict religious dogma and encourages readers to keep an open mind."
The irony is not lost on me that a school board based on a religion that is based entirely on the writings in a Book has issued instructions to pull a book from its school libraries’ shelves. Nor was the irony lost, thankfully, on the writer of that lead sentence.
Until la prochaine.
