Friends...

Friends come from the strangest places and times.

I just got a heart-warming telephone call from a woman in Baltimore. We've never met, and we may never meet, but she is a good friend. She's 85 years old now and quite spry. She called because she hadn't heard from me for a while, and she wanted to check in on me.

We met by telephone, when I worked at the Sears headquarters. That had to be back before October 2002. She had had a customer service problem, and for some unknown reason her complaint hit my desk. I wasn't supposed to handle customer complaints directly; they weren't in my job description. I was supposed to farm them out to a customer service rep at a call center.

And you know what that means. As well-meaning as many CSRs are, they know they have somebody standing behind them with a stopwatch, and they had better not be on the phone with the customer more than the allotted time of, say, five minutes!

I recall her surprise, when she answered her phone the first time I called her. I remember that she said that she didn't think anyone would call her back, after she left a message about her complaint.

Whatever the problem was, I solved it for her. It wasn't a big one; it just needed somebody's personal attention. I told her I'd take care of it; I took care of it; and I called and told her that I had taken care of it.

We were in touch during my last two years at Sears, and I still call her on her October birthday and on a few holidays. And when she calls me, I call her right back, so that the charge is not on her phone bill.

I always gave the customers my direct-dial phone number at Sears, so they could skip the switchboard and get right to my desk. She may have been one of the customers who said, "I'll bet you won't give me your home phone number."

I probably said, "I'll bet I will." And I did.

Maybe one of these days I'll write a book about customer service (or the lack thereof).