How to Deal with an Angry Customer
Once, in a previous job, I had a customer who had a legitimate complaint. The company I worked for had screwed up, this customer suffered for it and had every reason to be livid. He made it clear that he was dissatisfied and that he expected us to fix the issue, but he was unfailingly gracious and courteous about it. Because of that, I, and several other employees bent over backward to solve his issue. It was a nice object lesson for me about how to treat the employees of a business when something goes wrong that is not directly their fault.
He was so delighted with our resolution of the issue that he insisted on giving me a bottle of wine as a thank you. I told him that I couldn’t accept tips of any kind and that the manager would only pour it down the drain, but he insisted. I told the manager, in keeping with the rules. The manager told me later that he poured the wine down the drain, but there were no witnesses, and he smiled unnervingly when he said it. That, too, was a lesson for me.
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How to Seize an Opportunity
I’ve always been fascinated by devices that allow you to do something illegal and get away with it without making that activity any safer. Radar detectors are a great example. They aren’t collision detectors. They don’t warn you if your speed creeps up. They just tell you if someone who can cite you for speeding is in the area. Really, the radar detector's main function is as a priority-clarifier.
I owned a radar detector for a short time. I left it at home one day and got burgled. It was the most valuable thing they took (I was broke at the time). When the police asked what was missing, and I started the list with “Radar detector,” their enthusiasm for helping me decreased noticeably.
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How to Argue Like a Reasonable Adult
I think the problem isn’t that our role models are unrealistic, so much as who we pick to be our unrealistic role models. Looking back now, I see that most of the fictional characters I was presented with as role models were men who were really good at fighting, and at saving the semi-helpless women to whom they were attracted.
That’s not great, but it is better than what girls got for role models, which was women who were really good at being attractive and imploring the boys’ role models to save them.
Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood could have bucked that trend. They at least had other interests beyond fighting and being attractive. He was a professor and a scientist. She was a small business owner and a successful competitive drinker.
Of course, as a Hollywood film hero, Indiana Jones needed to have a different girlfriend every movie. He moved on to a squeamish damsel and a backstabbing Nazi, fine role models both!
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How to Decide Whether or Not to Tell Somebody the Painful Truth
So, in America, Smarties are a candy that’s pretty much just sugar pressed into a pill shape. I don’t know why they’re called Smarties, except that maybe their inventor named them after himself, because he was proud of having thought of a legal way to make money with a used pill press.
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How to Explain Men's Emotions
This comic was, of course, written for humorous purposes, and doesn’t really reflect my opinions about how men and women process their emotions.
In reality, I think the only real difference between how men and women handle their emotions is that women have to process several emotions men don’t. For example, women have to deal with the emotions created when men constantly accuse them of being overly emotional. This, sometimes makes women angry, which the man in question points to as proof, making her even angrier, resulting in an escalating chain reaction that will eventually end with women finally deposing us in a violent revolution, while their male victims shout things like, “What?!” “Calm down!” and “Don’t you think you’re overreacting?”
And I, for one, welcome our new feminine overlords. I remind them that some men are on the record as “getting it,” having, for example, said positive things about women in the commentaries posted with reruns of their web comics.
Note from Missy: I’ll put in a word with my cohorts about sparing you.
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How to Write Your Own Vows
To the wedding guests, self-written vows are often an excruciating exercise in enduring excessive earnestness. (Sorry, got a little carried away with the alliteration there.) From a performance point of view though, self-written vows are a marvelous opportunity to deliberately inflict discomfort on a large group of people. It’s the one time in the average person’s life that they can hand-select the members of a large audience, have that audience’s undivided attention, and say whatever they want with zero fear of being interrupted.
I’m kind of amazed that most personalized wedding vows don’s sound something like, “I promise to love, honor, and obey, and to treat you with respect and honestly, a marked contrast to how I’ve been treated by my cousin Eric, who is sitting in the third row, and still owes me money from when we were 16!”
If you tell everyone you know that you want to call a meeting of all of your family and friends so that you can say a few things, they tense up, and a lot of them will deliberately avoid the whole thing. If you tell them you’re getting married or renewing your vows, they’ll not only show up, they’ll bring a gift.
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How to Lead by Example
Sadly, it’s all true. That’s how I proposed, that’s how we got married, and that’s how we announced it to my family.
For the record, when my father and his wife at the time got their card, their first comment was, “Geez, Scott. You’ve gotten so fat, I didn’t recognize you in that picture.”
What I’m saying is that we Meyers aren’t an emotionally demonstrative bunch.
Note from Missy: It’s been over 20 years, but this is how I remember the proposal: We were walking by the shop window, looked at the rings, and I said, “Hey, that ring we were thinking about is on sale.” Then we both shrugged and were kind of like, “You wanna?” So really, either way, TOTES ROMANTIC.
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