I recently spent some time in a small southern Arkansas town. In places like that you can rekindle a fondness for friendly locals if you are not careful. I am accustomed to getting some pretty good service in the big city. In fact, it was my impression that people come from out of town just to get a taste of it. I need an occasional reminder that things are different “out there” in the surrounding towns.
I needed a new cell phone antenna because I am a busy klutz and have not had time to stand in line for a repair when it would be much easier to just buy a new one. It just so happened that I was working right next door to a Cingular agent. I was killing some time for something else to get fixed, so I stepped next door just to see what they had in stock.
Inside the window sat a short, middle aged woman. She came over and greeted me with a smile I had not seen in a very long while. I showed her the loose stub they call an antenna, and she casually reached behind her and pulled out the exact model I needed. In a daring feat of customer service, the same woman pulled out a torque wrench set and started taking my phone apart! With a steady pace and a determined manner, she gingerly opened the phone with a stripped wrench and held a friendly conversation at the same time. Her young son appeared every now and then. It is summer, and the offices teem with children in towns like this. I could see from her son that her dark roots didn’t need those highlights when she was that age. While she was talking to me, she and her son were playing the distraction game out of my eyeshot. This was too much for me to take, I had to step back to the shop. I left my phone in capable hands.
In a just few minutes she came next door with the phone perfectly assembled and a credit card approval agent on the phone for my zip code. With a signature I got a pink receipt and another smile of thanks for doing business. That was the complete package. A repaired phone AND a friendly rep, what more could I want? She didn’t even charge me for the install or the delivery. That was astounding.
Meanwhile, back at the store…I called the CELL PHONE number of the local Alltel repair man, and he was back in the CO in about 20 minutes. I can’t even imagine such a thing in the big city. I asked him if he was going to somehow hand the trouble ticket back to the big carrier, and he said he had no idea how to do that. He tried to call and speak to a human, but his efforts were stored is a voice mailbox somewhere in Texas. We both sighed, and went about cleaning up. It was 9pm and the shop owner had hung in there with me all day. He had been patiently answering phones to explain that they could blame lightning, and someone all the way from Little Rock was actually there working on it. It would have been really easy for him to blame us in a pre-recorded answering machine message, but he assumed his part in the situation as only someone from that town could do.
When all was said and done, the people of that small town had their internet back, I had a three bar cellphone signal and a four bar understanding that life is seasoned by salt of the earth people.