I’m here in London for various meetings having flown over from New York Friday night.
After arriving from NYC and passing through customs, etc, I head over to the express train which goes from Heathrow Airport to downtown London. It’s about a 15 minute ride and takes you to Paddington Station where you can go anywhere you need.
I’m in the coach section. Coach section meaning, yeah, for a 15 minute zip into the city you can ride in the first class section. Not sure why anybody would pay extra for this quick ride but, whatever.
Along comes some business guy who I’d seen in the customs line. He might have been on my flight. He plops down all gruff and grumbly. He starts to pound away on the blackberry keyboard when the conductor comes along to get the tickets. He gets to this guy and immediately says, sorry about the first class car being closed, there is a problem with the door, take your ticket and this note to the booth on your way out of Paddington Station. They will refund the entire trip and give you a free pass for a return. Cool, I’m thinkin, blog entry lay up about great pro-active customer service.
The customer, after hearing this, says: “I’ve been inconvenienced by not get what I paid for, had to move back here, and I don’t have time to process refunds, what are you going to do about it.”
To wit the conductor says “I’m sorry, I don’t speak American, so let me try again. You can ride the train for free both ways.”
The customer then says “That’s not good enough” which has the conductor say, okay. He hands the guy a complaint card, cancels the ticket he had and proceeds to say something to the effect of Head Office loves to help people like you, buh bye. No refund, no free trip back to the airport, only a lovely card which reads, safety is our number one priority.
[Bonus observation]
I’m getting a cup of tea at one of the fine tea shops. Okay, that’s not true, I’m getting a latte at the Starbucks in Paddington Station. I made up the tea part cuz I didn’t want any crap about flying ‘over the pond’ and having to run to some American chain place. Yeah, I know, but I didn’t hit the Burger King.
Anyway, there are two kids (could have been 20 year olds, still kids), hunched over a laptop (Mac, yikes!) doing some editing of HTML or maybe some chunk of whatever using OPML, don’t know for sure. After getting my tea, err, latte, I’m sitting down right next to these guys.
After observing these two for a couple of minutes, I say: “You two would be right at home using Wordstar!”
One guy turns to me and says, cool, is that a new editor? Is it open source? The other guy is immediately doing the Google thing on “Wordstar”. Before I get a chance to say a word, the Google guy, nudges the other who takes one look at the page, looks back at me, smiles and say, ahh yeah, right, good thought there, sir. Then they go back to work.
Yeah, you feel older sooner in this tech business.
Rick, thank you for making me feel older! *grrr* :)
Posted by: Nicole Simon | October 02, 2005 at 12:15