I received a recall notice for my 2004 Honda Odyssey. I called Holler Honda to make a recall service appointment. I was told, specifically, that it takes a few days for the part to come in so “we’ll schedule you about four or five days out.” I agreed.
When I showed up to my appointment at my scheduled time, I was asked my name and we verified that my appointment was valid. Manny, approached my driver side window and asked me my name again. He then asked me how we could help me, I thought that information had already been relayed when I made the appointment. Shouldn’t you know why your customers are there if they made the appointment?
It’s like a server at a restaurant asking her guests what they ordered after they ordered it.
I told Manny that I was there for the airbag recall service, he asked me if the part was already in stock. How the heck am I supposed to know if the part is in stock?
I asked him the same question. He said he’d check on it. He then came back and told me that part was not in stock, but asked me my address? I guess he needed one more piece of information to verify that there was the right silver Honda Odyssey owned by me at the right place during that exact time?
I made it clear that I didn’t appreciate having my time wasted, especially when you’re logging around a impatient two-year-old. And I made it clear what my expectations were, since I had made the appointment a few days out specifically so the part would be in. Manny explained to me that they’re having a problem with their call center not relating messages. That information means nothing to me. That’s his problem, and it shouldn’t have been made public. He said he would call me personally when they could do the work, I appreciate that. You should know, that he did just raise the bar by using the word “personally.” All customer service is personal. We’ll have to see how it pans out. It’s poor so far
As the summer season wraps up, I look back on some experiences and ask myself if good customer service is a thing of the past or is there hope for the future?
During my travels this summer I experienced some of the best and some of the worst customer service. Beginning in Orlando, Florida and no I wasn’t there to visit Disney but did make a stop at Downtown Disney. WOW, Disney and its staff take guest service to a level we all should only hope to reach but may never reach in our own workplace. But while at another place there in Orlando I was able to experience amazing service one minute from a staff member and then had a less than satisfying experience a few hours later in the same place by a different staff member.
How come every guest doesn’t get the same experience? Of course Disney…
Even if it’s a sales promo and shameless self promotion, the fiber-optic quality service being provided by epb is awesome. Check out this Facebook post compared to others as well. When you make a service promise, and tie it to SEC FOOTBALLyou’ve made a pact with God in Tennessee. You might even be Catholic and in the good graces of Vol fans if you are an installer. joke
This is one of those great movies which opens extremely violently. It then continues enigmatically. Every time you think it’s giving you the clue you need, it changes the mystery. Just like last time, it’s a movie about brothers. At least you are made to think that. I don’t want to give you any accidental spoilers.
Come to think of it, you could say it’s a Band of Brothers reunion. Starring Rick Gomez, Frank John Hughes, and Ron Livingston (All Easy Company) and emotionally validated by Vanessa Shaw. OD’ing high-end escort as a debut in Kubrick’sEyes Wide Shut, then a bit more of a dramatic career since including 3:10 to Yuma, The Hills Have Eyes redux, Side Effects and Showtimes’s Ray Donavan, really create a rounded co-star. The emotion in this movie is right on the surface.
This lineup of actors certainly helps portray it so that it doesn’t just come off as cheesy melodrama.
After the violent opening we discover that the attacked man is a writer, and not sure if the attack we saw happened or was a dream. What is alluded to is “you’ve been through a lot.” and some other vague hints of
trauma. We simply assume that means the opening violence. One begins to wonder, given the severity of the attack, why our protagonist has no scars or lasting negative effects.
Henry decides, after a small yet garish cocktail party thrown by his editor, that he’s going to go to his cabin in the woods to write his next masterpiece.
A quick bathtub scene between Henry and Amy solidifies the emotional bond. It’s an important factor later. It seems simple and inconsequential. Remember it at the end.
The second act of this mystery begins. We go immediately from an urban setting into a lone desert highway. It just gives the film a completely different feel. We are as alone and unguarded as our writer. Henry wonders aloud what the heck he is going to write about. The viewer may again begin to question reality. Wouldn’t a writer at least have some idea about his upcoming novel, before he leaves to isolate himself in his art? We also begin to realize that Henry has a meticulous eye for details. We assume it’s because he’s a writer, and that’s a common trait. It becomes a bit more useful. We get a little bit more action when an aggressive large wheeled, monster-style truck attempts to run Henry off the road. It’s purposeful conflict, reminding us that the attack isn’t so far away, even if Henry appears to have been completely healed. When our next main character enters the frame, he is sitting calmly at the counter of the diner which can’t be called a greasy spoon, for fear of insulting greasy spoons. A series of unexplainable and extremely tense events follow. An exchange of witty accusations and purposeful and seemingly contrived explanations volley back-and-forth and this reviewers sense of calm, security and trust follows. Hints and allegations begin to fly around and the stranger at the counter turns out to be extremely familiar after all. The scene happens to take this turn extremely easily after our struggle. So as a viewer, i’m still very skeptical. This is a type of tense conflict that keeps you glued. One begins to try to find comfort by assuming that the stranger was the attacker after all. He even asked Henry if he looks familiar to him. The keyword is: familiar. From this point on it’s hard not to spoil the movie. Just pay close attention to the verbal exchange at the counter.
The third act begins as easily as the previous two. We’re in a very comfortable cabin, drinking very expensive scotch, and eating a dinner of very comforting macaroni and cheese. It’s a heartwarming scene. Almost too heartwarming to be believable. You don’t trust the calm and easiness. After what we’ve seen so far it’s just too facilitating. It doesn’t take long for that skepticism to be proven. In the final scenes and denouement of this extremely well acted and well-written drama, as many mysteries are introduced as are finally solved. We are left with a very warm feeling; we are left with calmness and ease of mind. Leave is a wonderful movie full of intrigue. There are scenes of extreme violence and of tear rendering and heart wrenching love.
Be sure to take note of the final credits. It will make what you just saw even more authentic and add a special value. There’s really not a whole lot about the second half of this movie that I can tell you without completely ruining it just please watch it all the way through, including the writing and directing credits.
Here are the first ten bad ideas about which I could think of writing:
What I did on my summer break.
My garden.
The things I had to sell so I wouldn’t go broke.
Fictitious accounts based on entries in an old schedule book I found.
A review of all of the Louis l’Amour Westerns I inherited.
An essay about Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles are almost as good as Wesley Strieber’s The Hunger, but way better than anything written in the last 10 years about vampires.
Mousses or the animal moose.
Selecting a new sofa.
A man sees acrime committed in the background of a Vine video and is compelled to solve the mystery.
This is one of those great movies to which you already know the ending. It’s not predictable. It might be accused of being formulaic. It’s a good formula though. We like it. It tells you that the good guys win after they’ve been beaten, badly, and get back up. It is stacked with solid acting, great actors, characters you just want to believe in and hope they win, so you watch it in case it doesn’t turn out the way you absolutely know it’s going to.
A couple of otherwise decent brothers from northern Pennsylvania – one a blue-collar mill worker , the other a soldier on his way to the Middle East – get seriously entangled in what passes for racketeering in this part of the world. It’s not the olive oil slick version of organized crime. It’s cut offs, illicit drug laboratories, and inferred progeny of incest. A small-time bookie and loan shark operating out of his hole in the wall dive bar holds debt over the younger brother – Rodney Baze – played by Casey Affleck. The older brother -Russell Baze – who insinuates that he continually gets his younger brother out of as much dangerous he puts himself in, is played by Christian Bale. You know how good Christian Bale is already. Exchanging his English accent for the almost Midwest style of middle Pennsylvania is only the beginning. Quite frankly I haven’t heard Christian Bale uses native accent in much, maybe not since Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun. The Prestige may not count, since he affected that one as well.
Willem Defoe is the local loan shark and bookie, John Petty, making most of his money on rigged bare-knuckle fights between one broke mill worker and another. The movie opens introducing us to a real son of a bitch named Harlan – that’s always a son of a bitch name-played by Woody Harrelson. Harrelson is awesome. I even forgive him for the Kurt Cobain meets Sling Blade character he played in The Hunger Games.
There’s not a lot of useless exposition in the beginning of the movie. There is some building of hard-scrabbled character. We automatically care about the characters because they’re honest and they’re written very well. Their struggles seem like struggles. They don’t have to turn to the camera and explain them. They’re evident and they’re authentic. The father of the brothers is dying. Their uncle, the dying man’s little brother, “Red” Baze – played by the stalwart Sam Shepard sits vigil at his hospital bedside, only the hospital bed is in the living room. We know that won’t end well, the film is not trying to trick us there. So we already have empathy. There’s not a lot of political intrigue or argument when we find out that Casey Affleck’s character Rodney, comes home shell shocked.His tattoos are exaggerated a bit, but no more hyperbolic than the character itself.
Within the first 15 minutes Russell is locked up for DUI manslaughter. So we don’t have to wait for bad things to happen to him. We already believe he’s a good guy, visiting his dad every morning before he goes to work, having that job to begin with an looking after his little brother. We find out that he has a love interest who loves him dearly, played by Zoe Saldana. She doesn’t wait for Russell to return, to her own heart breaking chagrin. We learn upon their new meeting, outside of prison, that Lena is pregnant, with the sheriff’s baby. One of my all time favorites Forest Whitaker plays the small-town sheriff, Wesley Barnes.
Wesley Barnes notices Russel’s return and leaves it at that. This shows he is a trusting and trust-worthy man. He and Lena even come for dinner to help console the remaining Bazes. The topic of love and Lena comes up when Russel questions Wesleys efforts in apprehending Harlan. Wesley deflects only once, accusing Russell of leaving Lena alone and unprotected while he did his bid. He later defends his position in the Baze home by saying that their relationship may not be fiery, bt it’s a good thing. That’s good enough, for now, for Russell. Barne’s forthrightness acts as a foil when Russel goes on a vigilante mission, avenging Rodney’s eventual murder at the hands of Harrelson’s Harlan. No spoiler alert needed, the movie really builds up to it. What you don’t know is when. He gets beaten so badly, so many times, it could happen at least three times in the film. Barnes’ nobility extends across state-lines and is respected and reflected in a NJ officer extending Red and Russel an opportunity to walk away and live to fight another day, “Wink, Wink.”
The characters are real, they are extreme but necessarily so, or they wont stand out against the backdrop of hard violence, hardcore rural decay and rust and hard-won justice. Shirtless fights occur in rings made of onlookers is dilapidated industrial warehouses and abandoned plants. Blood and sweat replaced oil and steam, suggesting that fights are the real job market and product. The cast is solid, the characters are a product of that, excusing any revenge plot predictability one may find. There is a notable comparison made to Russel’s inability to pull a trigger on a whitetail buck, and the ease he finds in doing so later on.
For years it has been common practice for restaurants to add a fixed gratuity to parties of five or more. As of the beginning of this year, however, how restaurants handle tips for large parties is going to have to change. The IRS came out with a new ruling this year that draws a more distinct division between what are considered tips and what are considered service charges. From here on out, it will no longer be legal to require a tip and still call it a tip. If it’s a mandatory fee, it is now called a service charge, which changes how restaurants can handle payouts for bonuses.
It used to be that cash tips generally went unreported, though both tips and wages are technically taxable. Those days are mostly gone now, what with credit cards and more stringent reporting and tracking requirements. This change in what constitutes service…
I sent an email quite a few times regarding this field trip. I explained that it would be a day long event. I told them (parents) their students need to be on campus by 8 AM because that’s when we were leaving. Still the day before I got slack and grief for making them show up an hour early for school. This is typically an hour later than most public high school students had to show up. The Ampersand School is a private school in Longwood, Florida. We believe in the individuality of education, we believe in the quality and importance of each student as an individual. To this end I am trying to make my history class as experiential as possible.
By definition we’ve missed history. I’m going on with clichés about how you can’t live in the past, or how you can’t rebuild the past. We read The Great Gatsby last year so we learned through the eyes of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Nick Caraway, that trying to live in your own past or remake the past is literally deadly. No I mean literally in the sense that it came from literature and I mean literally in the sense that it can happen absolutely. I do not mean literally in the new way which it has been redefined, as figurative speech. More on that another time. This field trip is designed in three parts. The first part consists of a one hour stopped to Philippe Park in Safety Harbor, Florida. The park is rich in history, has a Tocabaga Indian mound made of refuse shells from a culture centuries past. It also has a local cultural significance.
The second part of our trip is a short back track over Tampa Bay to the Tampa Bay history Center on Old Waters Street. That section of town is historical by itself. But the Tampa Bay History Center has an excellent showcase of that region’s past. Also, there is a special display about Patrick Smith’s A Land Remembered. It’s historical fiction and incredibly accurate and respectful novel about how old Florida was settled, and it’s incredibly significant history in both United States and the world. We’re looking especially forward to that display.
The last part of the trip is a walking tour of Ybor City. Ybor city is such a significant place. I am using the word significant entirely too much. God forbid it be overused in an educational setting. Typically you just here “state this” and “Standard that…”I always knew it (Ybor) as the party district when I was at the University of South Florida. It is so much richer than that. Ybor city was a hub of crime and one of the early petri dishes from which The primordial Cosa Nostra oozed. It all started as a way to make money rolling cigars.
It didn’t exactly go down as planned. But then nothing ever does. In fact I’ve learned not to plan outcomes. First of all, one student’s mother wouldn’t let her go because she felt the distance equaled a lack of safety. She asked if there was anything that her daughter could do to make it up. I’m afraid that the lesson was purely experiential. Nothing you can do to make that up. There’s no substitute for experience is exactly what I told her. I didn’t read her reply, perhaps wrongly, but I assumed it was going to be argumentative. Another young man didn’t make that 8 AM cut off. In fact, he didn’t make the 8:15 extension either. Let me go back just a minute. I had to pick up a rental van at 7 AM at an airport satellite parking lot. At 7 AM that lot is unattended and the rental office is closed. I was able to find the lot where the vans were parked. There were about 25 vans. There was no way of telling which one was mine exactly. There is, as it turns out, a way of telling exactly which van is yours. I didn’t discover that at a convenient time.
There’s a handful of white vans, a handful of black vans. I searched all the black vans first. I checked on top of all the tires and inside the covers of the gas tanks. I finally came upon a beautiful shiny black van with the key readily available in the gas tank cover. I opened the door and looked inside. All the seats were leather and it was very spacious and comfy. I knew that couldn’t be it. A Gentleman pulled up in a similar van and informed me that those were limousine style pick up vans for the airport. I asked him where my van company was and he pointed to the lot of white vans. I want over and started a similar inspection. I started checking the tires and gas caps.
I found two vans right off the bat whose keys were also available in the gas can. One was a dirty little van so I assumed that wasn’t mine. The other van with the key available was similarly sized, but newer and cleaner. I just I decided that was my van. I drove it out and headed back toward school. As I kept looking in the rearview mirror and trying to figure out just how I was going to fit 15 people in the van. I kept doing the math in my head, counting seatbelts and possible ass-space. Like preceding situations, nothing was adding up. When I looked down at the key ring one more time, I noticed the number 12 followed by the word “pass.” It dawned on me that I had taken the wrong van, a 12 passenger one, not the 15 passenger one I reserved. I was already well into my timetable and still on time for the field trip. So I just decided I was somehow going to try to make that work. It dawned on me soon after that,
no matter how hard I tried it wasn’t going to work.
I reached out and asked a parent if she would like to come because we had one more open spot. She said yes. I said, “Great! You can drive too. That’ll really help, some of the big kids don’t want to get squished into the van.” She was agreeable and my plan was rolling.
Now it occurs to me at this moment how easy it is to steal a van near the airport in Orlando. (MCO) Nobody checked my papers, nobody asked for my ID. I’m sure I’m on camera. But I basically told the attendant at their gate that I wasn’t there to park and then get shuttled to the airport, I was there to pick up the van from the rental agency who used their back lot. He let me right in. I left with the van. Considering I took the wrong van, I’m going to go ahead and tell you that it was just that easy to steal a van. I just happened to bring it back, and pay.
It’s not even this hard…
So now we are on the timetable, only about 15 minutes late. I decided that it was still going to work if we followed my schedule. About one hour into the trip, somewhere around Auburndale, maybe a little further towards Tampa, my phone rang and I answered it. It was a nice lady at the van rental agency. She had gotten the emails that I had sent her regarding taking the wrong van, hoping it wouldn’t cost too much trouble etc. She politely asked me if I was going to return the van that I had wrongly taken. I politely informed her that it was too late for that. We were practically in Tampa already. We were not practically in Tampa already. But we were closer to Tampa than we were to the rental lot. I told her that The van I left was much bigger than the van I took. That still leaves the client who needed that van with extra room, not less. She agreed that the person who supposed to have the van I w
as driving would be getting a better deal. Furthermore, it would be at my expense since I’m actually paying 15 person van fee and driving a 12. She agreed, or maybe just conceded. And we kept on our way. We arrived at Philippe Park in Safety Harbor exactly at 10:30 as I had planned. We went over a few expectations regarding written activities and log keeping for the day, and began our nature hike facilitated by Mr. Clay on the way to the indigenous midden, or Shell
mound left behind by the Tampa Bay Tocobaga Indians. The whole experience was exceptional.
Service is The Product 