Customer Appreciation

Snafugirl was right, my Canadian lady's flexibility proved to be very important that day.

When I realized my careless mistake (by reversing the order of an airport transfer, told here) my reaction was to ring a driver mate. I asked him to check on the arrival time of the flight from Toronto, hoping that it was an hour late.

Too much to ask for?

Yep. The flight was early. Drat. At this point I'm on my way to Tampa airport.

Next, I tried the customer's number. For whatever reason, the call didn't work, not even diverting to voicemail. Damn. Nothing for it but to call The Boss.

Remarkably, he didn't launch. The rocket sat on the pad without the motors igniting. I gave him my estimated time of arrival at the airport, and suggested that he might like to call another company with cars closer. Nope. He wanted to salvage the situation.

After a few minutes he called back. The customer was at the airport, and was planning to have coffee while she waited for me. Foot to the floor time.

The Lincoln Towncar is a large automobile with a large engine, but it's not exactly a racer. In a straight line, however, on a nice smooth highway, she can move. Let's just say that I averaged somewhere in the hot-day Fahrenheit numbers that day, breaking my record as a chauffeur for the distance.

I attempted to call the customer with about five minutes to run, and this time she answered. Just the tiniest, almost unnoticeable hint of annoyance came through in her voice. A few minutes later, I spied her curbside and she was in the car and we were on our way. Elapsed time from recognition of mistake: 43 minutes.

Gratitude for her philosophic nature doesn't cover my emotion. Super grateful? She was damned gracious, with that valuable intellectual foothold: people make mistakes.

And after all that, she still insisted on tipping me. Amazing.

First Time

A new customer is good for both me and The Boss. The benefit to The Boss is clear, but for me it's an opportunity to focus on what makes a good (or even, ahem, excellent) chauffeur.

Because we're minimum-wage folks, we work for tips, and the time-honored way to garner a good tip is to meet and exceed the customer's expectations. First impressions are as important as conventional wisdom suggests, so I am hyper-aware of making a good impression in those minutes immediately after meeting the new person.

But sometimes the relationship goes the other way. The customer can make a big impression on me, as happened Tuesday morning. Collecting the gentleman from his comfortable established home, I knew something was up when, after some perfunctory chit-chat, he said;

You know, Wombat, Tiger Woods has fucked it for the rest of us, that prick.

Firstly, use of the word 'fuck' puts me, the driver, on a different relationship footing with a customer. Secondly, what on earth was he talking about? After a second, I figured it out - he was telling me that he was an enthusiast for adultery.

Thus began an hour-long tour of this man's life, from his financial woes to his infidelities. He talked at length about his family, especially his many children and his many, many grandchildren. Retired from business, Facebook is his new enthusiasm, a marvel that allows him to keep up with his many widely distributed neices and nephews, although some of them "...find it a bit creepy" that he's so intent on being their friend.

But the focus of his thinking was his trips to Havana. My man could only be described as a part-time sex-tourist, waxing fond about his past visits to Cuba for the enthusiastic, fruity and cheap (cheap!) prostitutes. Apparently, once you find the right guy down there (a man he oddly referred to as "...my John...") all doors are open. John (or The John) knows the way around obstacles to free love created by the fact that "the government owns everything down there, you know". Which would be at least a partial description of a communist dictatorship.

Whenever someone decides to spill their guts to me, a perfect stranger, I wonder why. Is is because the Town Car has a kind of confessional effect? Am I like a priest because the customer cannot see my face? Or is it something about me that encourages them to tell all?

I'm going to ask this nice man soon, because he invited me to a week in Havana in February. We'll have time to talk then.




For a more detailed description of my new buddy's enthusiasms. [link]