The minutes ticked by, with me pressing “2” for “No” to offer after offer. Didn’t I want the fifteen extra sets of beads and brads, the “free” Target card and gas card, the dining discounts card, or the super-expensive overnight shipping because what sane human could wait for the lumbering wagon-train approach of standard shipping to get started?
“No!” I finally screamed. “Just place the order you bejeweled bee-atch!”
Pause.
“I’m sorry,” said the recorded voice. “I didn’t quite understand that last answer. Could you repeat it?”
Oh, most assuredly. She wasn’t real, after all. I laid her out and each time she came back for more, always calm: “I didn’t quite understand that last answer. Could you repeat it?”
After a while it wasn’t fun anymore. I pressed a few more “2”s to decline a “spectacular one-time-only” time-share offer. Of course they don’t call it “time-share” anymore. That word is about as popular as the phrase “convicted child molester” so they call it “shared ownership” these days.
Minutes ticked by and it was over. The way I’d been treated, I felt like I should roll over and light a cigarette.
No matter. It’s done now and all I have to do is watch my mailbox. Which would be much improved with a few sparkly doo-dads by the way.
Example No. 2 (which is really worse)
This may be the best definition of Customer Dis-Service in the history of the airlines.
It seems that a first-class passenger who was taking a nap on a recent British Airways flight from New Delhi to London awoke to find the body of an elderly woman, who had died on the flight while in economy class, strapped into the seat beside him.
Which just goes to show that apparently some people will do anything for an upgrade.
As flight attendants wedged the body into the seat with pillows, because of turbulence, the horrified passenger complained about having to complete the nine-hour flight with a corpse beside him. Granted, the corpse wouldn’t be nagging him for the rest of his roasted peanuts, but still.
And here’s where the Customer Dis-Service comes in. When he complained, the flight attendants responded, and I quote, “Get over it.”
Oh? How exactly?
While some people have said the passenger was insensitive and shallow to complain, you must remember that this was a very long flight. No amount of steaming hot towels, eye shades, courtesy pajamas, and real china and crystal could make up for the fact that there was a body rapidly decomposing in stuffy, recirculated airplane air beside this poor bastard.
Talk about ruining your foie gras. Sitting beside the recently dead can’t be soothed by a choice of herbal teas and a nice hot breakfast whilst watching Wedding Crashers II in slipperettes.
I don’t think the airline handled this very well because they didn’t even offer the guy a free ticket. Hell, I got one of those just for agreeing to wait an hour for the next flight to New York one time. You stick a dead person beside me for nine hours and I’ll freakin’ own your airline.
And, not to be mean about it but, really, since the poor thing was dead, did it really matter whether she flew in first class or economy? How ironic that she probably never got to fly first class in her life and, when she finally did, she was too dead to enjoy it. The fancy noise-blocking headphones, the fabulous choice of individual movies and music channels, the “done been paid for” single-malt Scotch…I’m just saying.
Perhaps British Airways should take a cue from Singapore Airlines, which, I swear, has installed “corpse cupboards” on its airliners.
Is it just me or should we all be thinking that flying must be way more dangerous than we thought?
I imagine even the corpse cupboards are different depending on the price of your ticket: a roomy armoire for first-class corpses, a metal school locker for business-class fliers and, for the economy-class corpse, a vacant overhead bin if available or, if not, just a ride up and down the aisles on the bottom tray of the beverage cart for the remainder of the flight.
Which, if you think about it, would give new meaning to the phrase “stiff drink.”
Customer Dis-Service is just evidence of a growing culture of crappy behavior that hangs around like a fart in a hot shower.
You can’t get rid of it, and the most maddening part of it is when they act like they’re doing you a favor.
Which brings me to
Customer Dis-Service No. 3: The Rewards Card Racket.
When the perky clerk at the drugstore asked if I had a “rewards card” I said, “No.”
Big mistake. They are trained to shove that rewards card at you as proof how much they value you as a customer. Oh, and if you wouldn’t mind signing here, here, here and, yes, right here because we need your phone number, e-mail address, home address, preference in fat-free salad dressings and any damn thing else we can think of.
“Would you like to fill out a rewards card application?” she asked.
“No thanks,” I said. “I’m in a bit of a hurry.”
“You know,” she said (oh, here it comes, the beginnings of a sales-pout), “If you had used a reward card today you could have saved ten percent.”
“It was a 3 Musketeers bar and a National Enquirer, hon. What would I have saved? Like, four cents?”
“Don’t you want to save on future purchases?” (I swear this chick was relentless.)
“Yes,” I said, “but I know how this works. Aren’t you going to clutter my mailbox and my e-mail with a bunch of useless offers and junk I don’t want and sell my personal information to every idiot on the street?”
“Oh, no, ma’am. Just a very few select idiots will get your personal information.”
Right.
Look, I’m sick of these “rewards.” I don’t want the stupid free taco “reward” if I remember to get the card stamped for the first twenty visits. I don’t want to work that damn hard for a free taco or seven cents off mouthwash or whatever. Quit giving me stuff to keep me coming back and pretending you’re doing me a favor.
If you want to thank me for my business, don’t give me one more punchable card, magnetized strip card, or laminated key chain fob that has everything but my damn DNA encoded in it.
Admittedly, my reaction has gotten a bit, uh, animated.
The clerk at the big-box electronics store only gets so far as “Would you…” before I scream, “No!”
Sometimes they just flat-out lie to you. At a music store they promised that if I joined their “rewards” program they wouldn’t bug me, just send the occasional mailing of sales for “preferred customers.” They didn’t mention the weekly automated calls to pitch new products, which began almost as soon as I foolishly signed up.
Besides, one would hope that all customers are preferred, right?
At my favorite clothing store, they always ask to see my preferred customer card when I check out.
“Does this give me a discount?” I ask.
“Well, no.”
“Then, what good is it?”
“It tracks how many times you come in the store.”
“So why is this useful to me?”
“Well, sometimes we mail out early notices that we’re having a sale.”
“Is there a discount?”
“Well, no. But you get to know about the sale before the other customers.”
“You mean the unpreferred customers?”
“Well, all of our customers are preferred. We don’t want to say that any of them are ‘unpreferred.’”
“I prefer not to have to look for a card that doesn’t do anything for me but does a lot for you.”
“You’re weird.”
“But I’m the customer! The customer is always right!”
“Who told you that?”
I dunno. Methusaleh?
My theory is that the Customer Dis-Service folks have left us so frustrated that we’re all getting more and more hateful.
The other night I went to the movies with duh-
hubby and the Princess. It was a decent movie about eight dogs left behind during an Antarctic expedition gone bad. The dogs had a sucky time of it waiting for their human to come back with his gorgeous on-again/off-again girlfriend and rescue them.
Smack in the middle of the movie, a man and woman walked into the theater and loudly asked the woman at the end of our row “How long’s this been going?”
She whispered a quick answer and then, to our astonishment, they stood there and weighed their options out loud. Should they sneak into this movie or perhaps another one? Oh, to be a moron and have so many choices.
While the dogs survived on screen by eating frozen whale innards and snagging birds out of the air like Frisbees, Mr. and Mrs. Bonehead chatted and even took time to sit down and call home to check on the kids, who, I’m guessing, weren’t nearly as smart as those poor blue-eyed Huskies.
All I’m saying is that we live in an unfair world where perfectly nice dogs have to survive on iced-over gull entrails and rude, noisy moviegoers get to gorge on suitcases of popcorn whenever they like. Opposable thumbs are so overrated.
Finally, mercifully, they stood up, dropped their popcorn suitcases loudly on the floor (“I ain’t cleaning up, much as they charge for these here movies”), wiped their hands on their sweat pants and announced, “Let’s go check out The Ring Two ’cause ain’t nothing happening here except a buncha snow and shit.”
Oh, sadness. Leaving so soon? Don’t forget to get your rewards card stamped. For every ten moviegoers you annoy, you get a free trip on British Airways in the Rotting Corpse section. And, if you act before midnight tomorrow, we’ll toss in a free bejeweling gizmo to give those sweats some zing!
30
Epilogue
A Queen at Last….
There comes a time in every mature Southern woman’s life when she finds herself sitting on a screened porch, a dishpan full of butterbeans waiting to be shelled in her lap, and a gardenia-scented breeze stirring just enough to make her souvenir-of-the-Outer-Banks lighthouse wind chimes go all tinkly-tankly, and she thinks to herself: “It just can’t get any better’n this.”
Simple pleasures are a Southern woman’s divine right. And they can be as simple as pulling a pan of cathead biscuits out of the oven to be served, directly, with turnip greens and chowchow you made with the bell peppers you picked your own self.
I was that simple soul sitting on the screened porch one day, but then the phone rang and everything changed. And that’s when it hit me that sometimes not-so-simple pleasures are equally delicious: I’m going to be a queen, y’all.
Being a queen is the other divine right of every Southern woman and it’s a sin and a shame how few of us actually get to do it.
I’m going to be a QUEEN! And not just any queen but the North Carolina Pecan Harvest Festival Queen!
When the festival organizers called to see if I would be their queen, I had one only one question:
“I won’t have to wear a bathing suit, will I?”
“Oh, Lord no!” said Bill, the chipper festival coordinator.
“Well you don’t have to sound so dang happy about that,” I pouted. I’d been a queen for less than twenty-five seconds and was already a diva, bless my heart.
Bill chuckled. “You can wear one if you want to, but it will be in November so you might get chilly riding on that float.”
A float?!
I’d only ridden on a float one other time in my life and that was just a couple of years ago in a tiny town in east Texas that was having a book festival. From the back of a decorated flatbed truck, we got to toss beads and Starbursts to an underwhelmed January crowd of about forty.
There was a handmade sign on the side of our “float” that said “Assorted Authors” (I know; who wouldn’t want to brave thirty-degree wind chill for “assorted authors”? I felt like we should be wearing those masks of famous literary figures, like Shakespeare or Nathaniel “Hot ’n’ Horny” Hawthorne). A few of the sparsely scattered spectators looked genuinely fearful that we might start conjugating verbs or diagramming sentences or something, but their passion for free beads and candy won out.
But that was just a flatbed truck and I didn’t even have a tiara so, clearly, it wasn’t really a queenly moment.
But this! This was different.
“You’ll be crowned at the luncheon on Friday,” said Bill, reading from some notes he’d made for me before the fateful call.
“Can I keep the tiara?”
“Uh, it says here, ‘If she asks, tell her she cannot keep the tiara.’”
Whoa. My reputation precedes me.
A little while later, while I was still basking in my future queendom, parade organizer Suzanne called to tell me about my ribbon-cutting duties and how I’d get to reign over the pecan cook-off.
I loved the way Suzanne said “pee-can” instead of the haughtier-than-thou “pe-cahn” which, along with the vile “any-ways,” is further evidence that Yankees are ruining our Southernspeak one syllable at a time.
Suzanne then told me that I’d be surrounded by eight teenage girls dressed in antebellum gowns with hoop skirts.
“They will comprise your official Queen’s Court,” she bubbled.
Somebody pinch me; I must be dreamin’.
The use of words like “reign” and “court” were most appealing and I figured that since the pecan belles basically exist to do my bidding, I would instruct them to detail my Taurus while I was in town.
I’m not sure why I was selected to be the North Carolina Pecan Harvest Festival Queen, unless it’s because I make a fairly fabulous pecan pie owing to a perfect mix of light and dark Karo syrup and a crust flakier than Drew Barrymore on Letterman, don’tchaknow.
I plan to research proper queenly behavior because I could practically hear Bill wince over the phone when I told him in a subsequent call that I’d done a little research and I was pretty sure that we could “kick Georgia’s ass” in production next year.
Hey, I’ve done my homework. I’m no lightweight queen (especially true after I sample ten kinds of homemade pecan tassies, which I can practically taste right now as I write this). Sure, we’ve produced five million pounds of pecans in a year before, but I think we can do better.
In fact, I’m issuing a royal decree. Yes, unlike poor Kate Middleton, who invested five years of her life trying to be Mrs. Prince William, I’m really going to be royalty.
I realize that it may seem a tad hypocritical of me to embrace my impending queenhood so enthusiastically when I’ve been known to make fun of pageant queens, but this is different y’all. I was not asked to be North Carolina Pecan Harvest Festival Queen (gawd, no matter how many times I write that, it still gives me goosebumps) because of big boobs (heaven knows) or babbling in the interview segment of some contest about how I want to help adults learn to read ’cause, let’s face it, y’all, they really shoulda learned that shit back when they were in school, am I right?
This isn’t a beauty contest; it’s about wisdom and maturity and, possibly, the ability to speak out when Little Miss Tiny Lower Possum Creek and Surrounding Tributaries won’t move her ass out of the way in time for me and my float to get on local TV.
This, I vow and declare, my hons: Although I will be queen for two full days, I won’t let it go to my head.
I will still sit and ponder the simple, perfect moments in life on my screened porch and I will nevah, evah forget all the little people who made my reign possible.
Oh, and I’m keeping the tiara, bitches.
Also by Celia Rivenbark
Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank
We’re Just Like You, Only Prettier
Bless Your Heart, Tramp
Acknowledgments
As always, I am deeply grateful to my fabulous agent, Jenny Bent, of Trident Media, and my incredibly talented editor, Jennifer Enderlin, of St. Martin’s Press. Without you two, there would be no new kitchen and I’d be back to writing obits and weddings for a l
iving. Thank-you just doesn’t begin to cover it.
Thanks to my precious husband, Scott Whisnant, whom I’m trying hard not to hate on account of he lost twenty-five pounds this year and I found ’em.
I’m grateful every hour of every day for my sweet daughter Sophie. Darling, you are the very reason I get up in the morning. Well, that and the fact that I really have to pee.
Thanks to Lisa Noecker, who understands what it’s like to be raised at the edge of a cornfield and want more. For all the “idees” you have given me over the years, I should pay you, but, well, I’m still hoping to add a guest bathroom.
Thanks also to David and Tricia Reid of Vicksburg, Mississippi, whose bravery and humor inspire me more than they could possibly know; and to Miss Sarah Saucier, the smartest seventeen-year-old in Louisiana, who already knows to carry a fried chicken purse into the movies. God help me if she ever starts writing books.
Love to family and friends and to everyone who has taken the time to e-mail me with words of support and ideas for books yet to be written. I am honestly humbled by your kindness and generosity.
—CELIA RIVENBARK
Wilmington, North Carolina
BELLE WEATHER. Copyright © 2008 by Celia Rivenbark. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
ISBN: 978-1-4299-2991-2
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