Home Comforts -- The B-Sides: Customer Service

Inevitably, after preparing the top-ten list a few weeks ago, a few experiences in recent days have staked a claim for the ‘revised edition’. Too late to make any changes, so to mark the halfway point in this thrilling countdown, over the next few days I'll be writing about a few more hankerings…

Try a stunt like this in Bolivia and you're probably looking at a
20-year stretch.

This is not something I thought too much about back home, I must say. Indeed, excessive attention from waiters/shop staff/FBI agents became an increasing bugbear of mine on our transatlantic forays back in the day.

American waiters in particular, whose confidence in the future knows no bounds. “Hey thur, everybody, mah name is Jim-Bob and ah’m gonna be taking y’all’s order today, and ah jist want yew to know that if there’s anything at all yew need from me, yew just press this here button and ah’ll be raght on over.” Strange to say, but when my ‘waiter for the day’ is checking on the progress of my meal at an approximate rate of every thirty seconds (almost always interrupting a truly fascinating conversation on the contents of the suitcase in ‘Pulp Fiction’ in the process), said button seems a tad redundant.

Things came to a head in Virginia one evening back in the autumn of 2011, when we enjoyed an otherwise lovely evening out with my aunt and uncle. After 90 minutes or so of this incessant pestering, Jim-Bob showed up with a sample of the desserts and got into future-tense overdrive. “Wayuhl, you’re gonna have a biscuit base with a lemon-scented cream topping…you’re gonna have a strawberry flavoured mousse with sprinkles…you’re gonna have a coconut sorbet coated in a spearmint sauce…”.

To which I really only could muster one reply: “AM I?!?!?!”

Oh, but how I yearn for Jim-Bob and his band of litigation-avoiders here in the tropics of Bolivia. Even in the sniffier UK, the prevailing attitude in retail is that the customer is always right. Here, the customer should be jolly well grateful the poor embattled shop owner is even giving them the time of day.

As evidenced by the time when I bought a box of Bible reading notes only for the office of the transport company in Trinidad to lose them. As compensation, I was offered half of the price of the books (pitiful, I know, but positively philanthropic down here). I reluctantly accepted the offer and held out my hand for the anticipated wad. “Oh no,” said the office manager, “you have to go and speak to the two ladies who run the office, work out who was there at the time of the delivery, and ask them to give you it from their paycheck”. Corporate responsibility?

Or the time I picked up three packs of 4 Duracell AAs, lured by the ‘3 for the price of 2’ offer on the boxes. At the checkout, the third box was not discounted. “You do know these are advertised as 3 for 2?” I put it to the shop owner. “Yes, but I can’t possibly let you take advantage of the offer,” he replied. “And why not?” I pushed. “Well, who would make up for the 10 Bolivianos we’d lose on the third packet?”. “Er, you would,” I posited.