Heath Ledger
…but Lindsay Lohan gets to live? That’s just not fair.
Ted Kennedy’s “Betrayal“
“And now the greatest betrayal! We are repaid with his abandonment!” the statement continues. “He’s picked the new guy over us. He’s joined the list of progressive white men who can’t or won’t handle the prospect of a woman president who is Hillary Clinton.”
I suppose they would prefer it if he picked Hillary based solely on the fact that she is a woman. So tired of the absurdity and contradiction in politics.
Second Chances
This isn’t really recent events, or at least not in a sense that interests anyone but me, but I had some thoughts after visiting a dry cleaner earlier this week. I got some shirts back from the same place a few weeks back, and they all came out with a very bad wrinkle on the bottom right of every shirt. I’m a skinny 22 y/o guy – I don’t tuck my shirts in when I go out, so that was sort of a big deal. I brought the shirts I hadn’t worn back in, assuming I’d just have to get them re-cleaned and was perfectly ready to pay for it. The person at the counter took the shirts that still had the cleaner’s tags on them, put them in a separate pile, did not charge me for them, and gave me an additional discount on the shirts that did need cleaning. Needless to say, I’m not changing cleaners until I move.
The reason I’m even writing this down is because it made me think of the SvN post about Amazon’s commitment to the customer. If a customer comes back with even semi-obvious evidence of something done wrong by your business, several things have happened:
- You fucked up.
- The customer noticed.
- The customer then for some reason decided to give you a second chance and come back.
The last part is especially important in a market like dry cleaning – there is likely another one two blocks away with the exact same equipment and prices. In any case, having been given that second chance, your response is crucial. The customer is right by default, but in this case, the customer actually IS right. It’s up to you to convince her that her business is important. Hell, even if you didn’t do anything wrong, as with the example in the SvN article, making the customer feel even a little special can go a long way towards building a lasting relationship. In that way, business is sort of like sex – it’s all about the mood, the little things. And speaking of which…
Sex and Status
I’ve recently decided that most things in life are about money… and money is about status… and status is almost entirely about sex. We’re still monkeys. Really smart monkeys.