Adventures in Customer Service

What's that Charles Dickens said, "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times"? It's an apt description for my encounters this week. First the good news. A week before Thanksgiving, I bought a scarf cleverly wrapped in a cardboard tube. It was only on Monday that I opened up the tube and found that it was empty. I steeled myself for the encounter at the store, retrieving the receipt from the bag and brushing up on my vocabulary. The actual encounter was anti-climatic. The manager listened to my tale of woe and promptly got me a replacement. Case closed.

Then this afternoon, I stopped off at a boulangerie on the way home from another errand (not the one we usually patronize because that one is closed on Saturday afternoons) and then dropped in our corner store for a few odds and ends. When I got to the register, I found (gasp!) that I did not have my wallet. The cashier graciously set my items aside and I headed back to the boulangerie, my heart pounding. When I walked in, I greeted the lady at the counter. There was no flicker of recognition. My stomach was in knots. I asked her if I had left my wallet there. She looked at me sternly, pulled my wallet out from a drawer, and told me I was lucky. The message was clear: you are irresponsible and you are damn lucky that I was nice enough to keep this for you. I thanked her profusely and headed back to the market. It's a happy ending no doubt but it sure left a sour taste in my mouth.