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.

Reverse Order

The driving gig gets to be boringly routine after a while. The boss calls around six in the evening with whatever he has for the next day. (No courtesy call if there's nothing, of course.)

As soon as he's finished talking, I work out how to fit my life around the driving jobs with which he's blessed me. The important bookend parameters are when I have to leave my place to pick up one of his cars, and when I'll be done.

Early in the summer His Highness provided me with a Tampa airport job. The customer was a regular, a lady who has a house locally the family use to escape Torontonian winters. She's the ideal client; happy, flexible, interesting, easy to chat to...and she's a generous (and, importantly, genuinely grateful) tipper.

A noon-time job like this one is always frustrating. From my place to collect the car, to her house, the drive to Tampa, the return, ten minutes to refuel, drop the car, back home adds up to three and one-half to four hours - the better part of a half a working day. If The Boss could attract sufficient business so we could string three or four or more together, that would be great. It would significantly up hour average hourly pay rate.

I'll stop dreaming now.

My thoughts were on anything but the job - I had things I was working on, people I wanted to call, stuff to do. Can you guess what I did?

Thinking.

Thinking.

Like a dope, my mind was stuck on the idea that I was picking her up from her house, and driving her to the airport. In fact, she was flying into Florida that day and wanted me to take her to her house.

Can you guess when I realized it? Yep, just as I approached her neighbourhood. I was the standard fifteen minutes early for the noted time...but that time was for the arrival of her Air Canada flight into an airport sixty-three miles away.

Man. Oh, man.

All my fault, all my own doing, all my own failure to concentrate.