Why Customer Service Isn't Important...

Beazley Books has a few sidelines like prints, small antiques and custom matting. We train cadaver dogs too but that’s another story. Staying on top of it all has driven me to drink, so when a regular customer came in this morning and saw me sipping my breakfast Guinness and asked, you got another one? That was a little presumptuous so I said, no, and he says, did you grow up in an orphanage or something? Well I grew up with four brothers and that’s a lot like living in an orphanage so that was very perceptive of him. Then a woman called and demanded to speak to the manager and I immediately detected evil (I can do that with small dogs and the elderly). I replied in my best Oxfordian English, this is he, and sure enough, she says that she spoke to a very rude man on the phone yesterday. What did he do now?, I asked, and she said the man was just unspeakably rude (for the record, all I told her yesterday was that I didn’t want to buy her box of Harlequin romances and that she should consider burning them for warmth). Well, I said, the man you spoke to is schizophrenic so you never really know who you’re talking to when you call the store…..he’ll be in this afternoon so why don’t you come in and slap him. She hung up on me, and if you’re thinking that it’s not a good idea to invite angry people to hit you, you might be right.