Pleasant is plenty

I had a couple of nice customer service encounters today and thought I’d share them with you.

I was trying to check out at the drug store and the guy ahead of me had printed a whole raft of photographs in a variety of sizes and styles. The young guy helping him couldn’t find the photo price list so the customer went through this long-winded dissertation that included not only so many of this size and so many of that, but also a fairly detailed discussion of the content of each picture.

I suppose some of you expect to read next that I fumed and grunted and eventually read someone the riot act. Admittedly, that might occasionally have been my response to such a delay. But it didn’t happen this time, and not because of any forbearance on my part. You see, this young guy kept giving me glances of acknowledgement and a couple of times apologized for the delay.

Even more to the point, he held me at bay without making the picture guy feel rushed. He knew his lack of knowledge about how to handle the transaction – he had to go back and forth to the photo machine a couple times to confirm his understanding of what he was handling – was delaying both of us. We knew it. And he knew we knew it. But his pleasant approach made the whole thing all right.

Later, I was picking up fish and chips from Ivar’s and the young lady taking orders and running the register was delightful, if only marginally competent. Turns out she had been working there just a couple of weeks and this was her first night running the front solo.  The reason I know this is that I asked her while I was waiting for the order I’d had to repeat a couple times before she got it right.

She’d had some trouble figuring out what the customer next in line wanted, as well. But she persevered, asking and repeating in her friendly way until she got it right, smiling genuinely all the while. And in chatting with her once our orders were back, I found that she truly loved her job, working with the public and bustling about, keeping her station clean and stocked. She was in her element, even if she hadn’t quite grasped all the elements.

Nothing particularly profound here except that in separate customer service encounters today, young  folks kept this crotchety old turd reasonably happy and even entertained when I could very well have been impatient and annoyed. And have been, in similar but less friendly situations.

Sometimes, pleasant is all you need.