Maybe I'm too demanding. Or too nostalgic. Or my expectations are too high. Maybe I am prone to disappointment after such an endless winter and the incessant Orange Menace. Or maybe the practice of "customer service" had disappeared long before I took notice.
Maybe it's all my mother's fault.
During the pandemic, interpersonal exchanges were supplanted by social distancing. Dropping a package on a doorstep became "outreach." Shouting someone's surname across a crowded cafe passed for "ministration." Self-checkout systems eliminated neighborly chitchat. Phone prompts provided anemic support. Insurance companies robbed both doctors and patients of all "bedside manner." Drive-throughs denied generations of table manners and attentiveness. Chatbots have not been coded to be curious or to accommodate special requests. The nanosecond nature of the Digital Age affords no time for niceties. Genuine customer service seems to have vanished from the zeitgeist.
Or maybe it's all my mother's fault.
My mother was head of customer service at a photo finishing plant in Philadelphia. For Gen X, Y, and Zers who still read but are too young to know the terms "customer service" or "photo finishing," there was a time when actual people owned actual hand-held devices (called Brownies and Instamatics, Nikons and Leicas) that did nothing but take still photographs; no video, no alarm clock, no calendar, no texts, no music, no apps, no phone. These gadgets were called cameras. You opened them, inserted a roll of 35-millimeter film onto rolling sprockets, closed the instrument, and snapped away.
After 24 or 36 snaps, you took that roll of exposed film to the nearest pharmacy or camera store or mall kiosk and it, in turn, sent the film to a photo finishing plant to process the film and then return the photos (and negatives) to the same store a few days or a week later. As people became somewhat impatient, disposable cameras were marketed with film preloaded, like the Kodak FunSaver or Fujifilm QuickSnap Flash. (Speaking of flash, there were real flash bulbs built into the cameras that would fire in darkened environments and blind the subject for a brief shining comic moment.)
When folks became more impatient, 24-hour photo shops sprang up. Yes, 24 hours was once considered high-speed, even though you had to wait for the earth to completely rotate on its axis before you could see whether your images turned out crisp or blurry, crooked or red-eyed. Not 24 seconds or 2.4 seconds, but 24 hours; life was leisurely in the last century, or lackluster or listless or just plain slow.
Anyway, my mother was in charge of customer service at a company called Perfect Photo. She served customers whose photographs or Super 8 movies were late, lost, or damaged.
I mention all this because last week, out of the clear blue, a dear relative sent me a copy of a letter that was sent to the president of Perfect Photo from a gentleman who owned a camera store on West 86th Street in Manhattan. This Sunday being Mother's Day, a good son ought to share that missive.
Dear Mr. Acker,
I am writing this letter to you because I feel that as the President of Perfect Photo you should be interested in both the inefficiency of certain members of your organization as well as the complete efficiency and, for lack of any other term, the devotion of one of your employees.
Last Thursday I sent a roll of Ektachrome film to your lab for one of my customers. It was most imperative that this film be returned on Friday. To insure its arrival on time, I marked it RUSH, stapled one of your rush tickets on the bag, and handed it personally to your driver.
When Friday's delivery arrived, the bag was not included. I called your lab in Philadelphia and spoke to one Rose Buschel. She promised to find the film and send it to me Special Delivery so that it would be in my store on Saturday morning. My customer needed the slides for an oral dissertation she was giving on Monday morning in conjunction with her Doctorate Thesis at N.Y.U. Without the slides, a year of hard work would have been in vain and her degree in jeopardy.
Saturday arrived but the slides did not. My customer broke down in tears. We called Rose Buschel at home and told her the situation. Rose followed through until the film was finally located. It had never even been processed. Rose, through means known only to God, then arranged for it to be processed on Sunday morning when the lab was closed and delivered to her own home. During this period, Rose called my customer several times to keep her abreast of the progress.
On Sunday morning, my customer took a train to Philadelphia and Rose's son picked her up at the station and brought her to Rose's house. While they waited for the slides to be delivered, Rose fed the girl lunch, gave her a slide viewer to take back with her, lent her some money so that she could get home, and had her son drive the girl back to the train station for her return to New York.
Rose Buschel may be but one employee in a large company, but she is the one who makes dealing with your company tolerable.
You have a gem there and I hope that her efforts are appreciated. I also assume she will be compensated for her expense and her time working on Saturday and Sunday.
Very truly yours,
Robert S.
My mother's compensation was helping a stranger get an advanced degree and showing her son that going the extra mile makes everyone feel better, and might even send karmic ripples across the universe. Maybe my mother instilled romantic, if unrealistic, expectations into a son who would live into 21st-century America.
My mother shuffled off this mortal coil in 2001. I miss her.
Happy Mother's Day, Mom.
Bruce Buschel is a writer who lives in Bridgehampton.