Momma Always Said...

Do you have sayings in your "mom" repertoire that you can trace DIRECTLY back to initially hearing from your mom?  I do.  More than I can count.  And of course my husband mocks many of them.  "Six of one, half a dozen of the other" is one he mocks.  Now days, I just say "same-sies".  Fewer words needed.  Sorta like texting.

But one of the cute little saying my mom was fond of was "you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar".  Now, we all know most of these sayings ARE true, but it's always nice to see them play out.  I got a chance to do just that.

We have a trip to Mexico planned.  Everything was all booked and shortly before Christmas I got the dreaded email saying that our flight information had changed.  And as we all know, changing flights are RARELY for the better.  So, I did what I normally do and put off dealing with it until after the holiday.  Heck, I put it off until after I had my tree down.  Finally I "grabbed the bull by the horns" (see what I did there?) and tacked the issue.  Our airline was American (yes, that was fun too, hearing they had filed for bankruptcy AFTER we had our flight booked) so I went online to see if there were any options that might work for us better than what our new changes were.  There was.  Although, the options returning (the changes they  made had us returning at 1145 at night with the kids needing to go to school the next morning) meant that we would put ourselves at risk if we didn't get through customs quickly in DFW, so I decided to just deal with the outbound flight.

I called American and when I got hooked up with an actual person, I was, well, sweet as honey.  I explained my dilemma (flight has us arriving later than I had hoped), had some options where the representative could start.  The representative found the changes that I wanted before I even suggested it and offered the change at no fee.  He then asked if I had any issues with the return trip.  I said I did, but even though it would mean some tired children upon return, I was OK with leaving it.  He made the changes, took my email address and said he would send me a change of itinerary.  I disconnected feeling very satisfied and thinking that people really DO respond better when approached in a nice way.  I went to my email and checked the changes and the representative had gone ahead and reconfigured our return flights such that the delay was minimized an we would be landing 2 hours earlier than expected.  BONUS!

This experience wasn't really anything new to me. Well, the extra effort the representative went to was nice and unexpected, but more and more I have found that the simple rule..."people respond in kind" almost always holds true.  Especially when you are dealing with customer service issues.  I suspect that they have a SUCKY job.  And hopefully, it just takes one person being nice to make their day.

I like making people's day.  I find that "what goes around, comes around". ;-)