43 posts tagged “mr fd”

Yesterday Mr FD and I experienced two ends of customer service - the good, the bad and the bad was ugly.

As mentioned in a previous post, Mr FD and I have been in the process of buying a car for the company that Mr FD is currently setting up. He started some two week ago on this process and he told everyone involved that he needed the car to leave on an extended trip last Monday. He just wanted the basic car, happy to choose from the colours on the show floor. Wanted no extras - oh except floor mats which now cost $180AUS for 4 rubber floor mats! Mr FD made call after call, repeating his need and his deadline. No one listened. They all heard what they wanted to hear, and then covered up with excuses of "fax didn't arrive" ,  "missed the deadline and head office won't process until tomorrow" and "they are out of the office and I'll leave theme a message" . Where do you leave the message? On the toilet wall of the business next door?

Anyway, we finally got the call to collect the car. We made an appointment for 2.30pm. When we arrived our saleswoman was nowhere to be seen. She was out on a test drive with another customer, even though we had an appointment and knew Mr FD had to leave that afternoon on an extended trip. A number of salesmen walked by us without even acknowledging that we were human and breathed. Eventually we made enough noise to be noticed and demanded to be served. A very junior member of the team took us through signing the papers and then she found a poor salesman who had a leg in a cast and couldn't make an exit to go through the car with Mr. FD. I made little effort to make small talk with Junior Girl as she kept up this charade of our Saleswoman returning at any moment, weeping over her unintended absence. Oh yeah.

An hour later we are driving out of the show room and Saleswoman appears. She throws herself in fron of our car and reefs open Mr. FD's door and screams "Congratulations " as though we had just given birth and not gone into spasms more of heart breaking debt. Then she plants a big lipsticky kiss on his cheek, something that normally would have his heart go into overdrive. THEN she runs to the otherside of the car and reefs open MY door, and rubs her cheek against mine. I take particular note of her name badge and facial features to add her to my stick list. I had never met this woman before, Mr FD had only ever spoken to her over the phone. Not a word of "sorry" even though "I knew that you were driving an hour to get here, and had an appointment with me, and were short of time". Nope, She had our money and she was onto the next sale. Customer service? I think not. Next company car, and there will be one or two or three, won't be bought from her.

On the other side, earlier that morning, a real estate salesman left his comatose mother to drive over an hour to bring some papers to us for signing as he knew Mr. FD needed to sign them before he left yesterday. [We are renting warehouse space]. While we were signing, the LOVELY [HANDSOME] Salesman received a phone call to inform him that his mother had just woken from the coma. She had been involved in a car accident a day or so previously. So this man spends 3 hours away from his possibly dying mother as he knew how important his role was in the next step of Mr FD's business. [If we had known before the meeting we would have gone to his office]

Wait there is a 3rd tale of service. Mr FD is in the seed business, pasture seed mainly. He had bought some seed and organized for it to be sent to a depot for delivery. Yesterday morning there is a knock at our front door, Mr FD goes outside and there is a delivery truck driver outside. The delivery man says "Got a pallet of seed, here for you, mate." They sent the damn seed to our residential address despite Mr FD making it obvious the residential address was for billing purposes only! The poor delivery driver had in fact alerted his office that they were sending him to a residential address with a pallet of seed, but they wouldn't listen or double check the details, so the poor delivery driver drove across town only to be told that "yes, that is right, this is the wrong address", and to have to drive back across town to the depot.

So not only are they giving bad customer service to their customers but they are giving bad customer service to each other. Your co-workers deserve as much as your customers, if not more.

To me, it is easier to do the right thing, and to do the right thing first time around than to do to the pretence dance. And if MR FD asks you to help him make a deadline - just remember there is a Flamingo Dancer with a stick list standing behind him.

[Stick list : list of names of all the people I am going to hit with a stick one day soon]

Is that a dragon I see before me?

Night 1:

Flamingo Dancer returns from the bathroom and Mr FD asks:

"Did you see any dragons?"

"Yes," said I. "They were bar-b-queing the yaks"

"I hope there are some leftovers for breakfast" he says and goes back to sleep.

Night 2:

Mr FD returns from the bathroom and I  ask:

"Did you see any dragons?"

"Dragons!" Mr FD exclaims. "I am sick of slaying dragons. Day in, day out, nothing but dragon slaying. At least they could keep it down to one a day." He returns to bed and goes back to sleep.

Dragons and yaks in our backyard...the neighbours are not going to be happy at all.

I am upstairs in my boudoir grappling with the finer points of Habermas and his three kinds of knowledge for an exam next Monday when I hear Mr FD at the foot of the stairs. Suddenly he bursts into song. Well, I think it was song, it may have been pain, but we won't debate that here right now.

Mr FD:  I, I who have nothing; I, I who have no one"

Shirley Bassey I (WHO HAVE NOTHING) & NEW YORK-MEDLEY

FD : In my next life I am thinking of coming back as Pavlov's dog.

• The star jasmine is flowering over the arbour outside our patio door. It looks like a huge white bridal bouquet and smells like heaven.

• Daughter 1 has her wedding dress. It took her 20 minutes to select off the rack. Daughter 2 had her bridesmaid dress. It took her 15 minutes to choose off the rack. The Boy has his groom's suit. It took him 90 minutes to choose off the rack...

• Grandma Flamingo fell asleep during the funeral on Friday. I looked at her and she was dozing on the pew. I told her to snap to, or she was in danger of being wheeled out to the hearse. She was ram rod straight for the rest of the service!

• Mr FD is flying to Adelaide tomorrow. Peace in our time! I won't say for whom! He has orders to bring back jumbo Haigh's chocolate frogs. They are HUGE and YUMMY and last about 32 seconds in the Flamingo Dancer household! He has been told not to come home if he fails in his mission.

• God daughter turned 1 last week. She is soooo cute. I played with her on Friday afternoon. We unwrapped her birthday present together. She was very serious about it, with a little frown across her brow until she achieved opening the present and had time to inspect and then the smiles came. A woman not easily won...Flamingo Dancer to the core!

• I understand why Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize. Didn't you breath a sigh of relief when he said the USA wouldn't go ahead with its Stars Wars project and putting bases in Poland etc facing Russia? I felt as though we had taken a giant step back from another catastrophe. I feel it is recognition that the rest of the world is happy dancing that USA is coming into the 21st century and seeking peace, not conflict. Give him another if it helps!

• My brother in law turned 68 on Friday. I have a BIL who is 68! We did not put candles on the cake.

• Son has learnt a new way to get extra money from me. He says he needs cash to get a hair cut and of course no mother is going to refuse that, so I hand over the cash. He somehow forgets to get the haircut and three weeks later asks me for cash for a haircut. Of course he needs it more urgently now and so no mother is going to refuse and so he gets the money. Now when he requests hair cut money, I ask if this is for the pretend haircut or the real haircut. He still gets the money. 

• You know that I am doing this just to waste time away from my studies don't you?

• For those of you who have seen the black face routine on Hey Hey It's Saturday, please don't think that is representative of contemporary Australian humour. Darryl Sommers has been the sad butt of jokes for the past few years and the only way he could cling to celebrity was to revisit a show concept that had its time 20 years ago. I was horrified to hear that they were bringing the stupid show back in the first place - it was always pathetic. A sad example of a television network who thought returning to the past would get ratings. One point though - few people picked up on the fact that the man with the white Michael Jackson face was in fact an Indian. Not that it made the skit any more palatable. Still the hoohah doesn't stop the children dying of starvation and malaria in Africa does it?

• Now that my daughters live away from home, it takes half a day of phone calls to catch up on my family each week - Mother Flamingo Dancer, Sister Flamingo Dancer, Daughter1 and Daughter 2...whew. Mr FD gets his mother and usually his sister, though there are times when we fight over answering the phone when we suspect it is her and I get the short straw and have to speak with her...

• It is raining tiny tiny rain drops. The first rain we have had in over 2 months. I am pretending I don't hear it, in case I scare it away. The lawn is crispy dry under my feet when I walk out to the clothes line...Mr FD just called out that it is raining. I told him to shut up. He apologised automatically as he is trained to do. I can smell the dust settling. Heaven.

• BIL asked me if I went to communion during the funeral mass. We both said at the same time "because that is the only way people know you are there!" I love my BIL - he understands my evilosity.

• It is raining harder now. Obviously the rain doesn't read blogs. Yet.

• I can't avoid the study any longer can I? Can I?