Sometimes it is nothing less than astounding how things
can just fall into place perfectly so that everything works out for the best.
It is no less astonishing when things fall into place in just the wrong way, thus making things harder than they have to be. I was half way home from Knoxville last week,
sitting in the Atlanta airport waiting for my connecting flight, when I
received a purchase order from a customer wanting a service call immediately.
Yeah, that customer was in Knoxville. Had he come through with that PO just a
couple of hours earlier, I could have changed my flights, stayed there, taken
care of him immediately, and saved my company a fortune in travel costs. But
no, that would have been too easy I s'pose, so yeah; Monday I was right back on
a plane to Knoxville again.
I had fully intended to travel in my preferred fashion,
but again things sort of conspired against it. My poor wife had been sick for
the entire weekend and when Monday 3AM rolled around, I was pretty sure that I
was coming down with it too. A sore throat and runny nose wasn't enough for me
to call off the trip, but it was
enough to change my mind about caking makeup onto my face in the hopes of
convincing blind and deaf people that I really was a woman - nothing to see
here - pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! I don't know if it was
the vitamin C I had been slamming or what, but I apparently ducked the sick
bullet because it never got any worse. Honestly, by the end of the day I was
fairly irritated that I had not traveled as Kim, but I hadn’t been willing to
risk spending the day wiping snot and makeup off of my nose.
Good news - I found another cache of records even better
than the last batch that I had found here. Several Neil Diamonds, including
"Hot August Night", two Simon and Garfunkel albums, Dusty
Springfield, and even two Ray Conniffs for my stupid Conniffs collection! I
hadn't really set out to collect all of his records but now it's a
"thing", kind of like collecting coffee cups or shot glasses.
Part way through the service call my customer made a
comment that he was not thrilled about how much it is costing him to keep his
spectrometer running. It took a bit of effort to drag the story out of him, but
it turns out that he had been bringing in a guy that my company fired a couple
of years ago to work on his machine. We
fired him because he was a thief and had no ethics, and he hasn't improved any
since then. I've had seven different customers come back to us and they all
tell the same story of how he had replaced almost every part in the instrument,
and some parts several times. For a machine that rarely fails for anything
other than the end of life of an onboard laser, this is astounding. Unless I
miss my guess, this asshole is taking components from one customer, and installing
them in the next customers instrument, and charging both for the pleasure. I've talked to my management until I'm blue
in the face, because I really feel we owe it to our customers to warn them
about this guy, but I'm told that it would be on shaky ground legally and
ethically speaking.
Well, plane is landing so I've gotta pack it up and make
the drive home from the airport. I'll be flying to Southern California tomorrow
morning to attend my sister in laws funeral. I'm not looking forward to that.
I'm still trying to decide if I will fly as close to pretty as I can get these
days or not as I will be checking into my hotel before I see any of my family.
Totally dreading the trip as only a month ago we all got together to cry over
the death of my niece. We have a family reunion planned for July so that just
once we can get together without a death as the driving factor. It's too bad
that we scheduled it too late for two of us .. . .
Hmm... You can't bad mouth the guy, but you can use "Factory Authorized", "OEM Parts" and "Genuine Factory Service" as reasons to choose your firm's service instead of the thief's service.
ReplyDeleteI am sorry about the deaths in the family. Let's hope no one else dies before the reunion....
Seeing that Dusty Springfield album cover brings back a few memories, I may even suggest that my band does a couple of the numbers.
ReplyDelete