For those of you who haven’t noticed, I have a thing about customer service. I worked in retail or customer service related jobs for over 20 years. I sat through all the classes, heard all the lectures, and was on the receiving end of a lot of customer abuse from the unhappy. So when I see a story about customer service stupidity, I just have to point it out.
I first read about Emergency Manager Steven Kuhr on CNN (but couldn’t find the link for this post). The way the story initially read, NY Governor Cuomo fired Kuhr for diverting a crew to remove a tree from his (the governor’s) driveway. Now, the story didn’t actually use the governor’s name. It just used the pronoun “him” in such a way that the antecedent leading to the pronoun led me to think it was Cuomo’s driveway. I thought, “Now that’s a classy move, to put himself after the residents of New York.”
Then I found out that Kuhr owned the house / driveway upon which the tree was fallen and wasn’t trying to earn points with the boss. He was just trying to get his own driveway cleared.
IMHO, Kuhr deserved to be fired for such a misappropriation of disaster management crews while other New Yorkers were still in trouble. I can’t fathom the thought that this soon after the disaster there was no more debris to be removed. I’m glad there was no delay in the firing because that might have sent the wrong message. On the other hand, will Kuhr’s removal actually slow down recovery efforts?
On another note, I can never walk out of a store or restaurant without praising good service. After 20 years of being on the other side of the complaints, when I see good things being done, I have to crow to someone about them. But when I see my employer do good things, or more accurately fellow employees do good things, I need to really crow about it. Understand, there are a lot of Allstate agents & claims adjusters who lost their homes and businesses due to Sandy. And yet this is what they’re doing with their time. Door to door, no less.
I’m reminded again why I like my day job.
