GREAT customer service

I complain often enough about lousy customer service, so I think it's only fair that I take a moment to single out someone who provided me with a fantastic service experience.

Sunday night my cell phone died, which was a big disappointment. I've had a Palm Pre for a couple of years, and it's a terrific phone...Besides making calls, I can surf the web on it, take high-quality pictures, play music, do pretty much whatever I need to do. But the Pre has a small design flaw that sometimes results in the phone's battery being unable to take a charge. Something comes loose in the little USB port on the side of the phone, and when you plug it in to charge it up, nothing happens, and then the battery just slowly dies.

That's what happened with mine Sunday night. Fortunately, I've had mine long enough that the folks at Sprint have been sending me emails, reminding me that I could now upgrade my phone at a reduced price, if I would just renew my contract. So I went online to look for a new phone.

There I found something called the HTC EVO 4G. It sort of looks like the i-phone, had all the features I need (plus quite a few more) and best of all, it was FREE (with the renewal of my contract.)

I have an acquaintance at the Sprint store in South St. Paul, so Monday morning I sent him an email asking two questions: 1) Was this the right phone for me; and 2) Could I come up to the store and pick it up? Here's where the plot thickens.

He told me that in order to get all of the available discounts that made the phone free, I would have to start the ordering process online at the Sprint web site. During that process, he said, I would have the option to "reserve in store." By choosing that option, I could order the phone, and then two hours later show up in his store to pick it up.

So I went to Sprint.com and started through the ordering process. I got all the way through and was ready to place the order, but I still hadn't seen the "reserve in store" button. I didn't want to submit the order and then find out I had to wait for the phone to be shipped, which the site said would take 2-5 days. So, I called the customer service number on the side of the screen to make sure I could get the phone at the store.

My call was answered by a guy named Jeff, and I had every reason to expect that Jeff would be like most customer service people and would do only the minimum amount of work necessary to get me an answer and get me off the phone. I was wrong. Way wrong.

I explained the situation, and Jeff said that, yes, I should have been able to find a "reserve in store" button on the web site, and he seemed genuinely puzzled that I couldn't. He asked if he could put me on hold while he talked to some techie. I said that would be fine, and expected a long wait.

He was back within a minute or so, and explained the problem. It turned out that I had been on the right screen in the ordering process, but I missed the "reserve in store" button because it was disabled, and reserving in store was not an option for this particular phone. This meant that I could only order the phone to be shipped, which meant I would be 2-5 days without a phone.

(Which isn't the end of the world, but from both a business and personal standpoint, it's difficult. I have an office line, but almost no one calls it, because my clients have all been conditioned to call my cell since I'm out of the office a lot. Also, I have all of my emails forwarded to the phone, so that if I'm on the road all day, I can still respond to an email without waiting to get home at night. Plus, my kids are conditioned to keep in touch with me by texting me. And most importantly, I have to have a device to play Sudoku on before I fall asleep at night! So several days without my cell is quite an inconvenience.)

I said I would call the store and see if there were any other options, and apparently Jeff could hear the disappointment in voice. At that point, it would have been reasonable for him to say, "I'm really sorry, there's just nothing I can do about it. Place your order and we'll get it shipped out as soon as possible."

Instead, he said, "Call your friend at the store and see what he says, and I'm going to call you back in a half-hour or so and check on things."

I called the Sprint store, and my guy said, "Sorry, I guess we're stuck." But he assured me that if I ordered it, they usually arrived in just 2-3 days.

At that point I was resigned to calling my clients and telling them I had no cell service for a few days, and that I might not respond to emails very quickly.

Then Jeff called back.

First, he wanted to know if the Sprint store had been able to help me out. When I said "no," he said "I've had your case open here for about an hour, trying to figure out what we can do. What if I could overnight you the phones? Could you get by the rest of they day without your phone?"

I said that yes, I could get by for the day, although I wasn't crazy about having to pay for overnight shipping. "No, we won't charge you for that," he said. Then he went online himself, accessed my account, and placed the order to provide overnight shipping.

At that point, I was thrilled with the level of service. Then it got even better.

"Now, let's talk about the Palm Pre," he said. "Let's try a couple things to see if we can get it going." He had talked to another techie, who gave him a couple of things to try involving removing the battery, re-plugging the phone in, etc...Unfortunately, none of those worked.

"Well then," he said, "I can set it up to have all of the calls to that number forwarded to a different number for today if that will help." Yes, I said, that would help immensely. So I gave him my office number, and Jeff went to work setting up the forwarding of my cell phone calls to my office line.

In the middle of all this, something he said about the battery reminded me that I had another cell phone battery in the house. My sons both have Palm phones, and I had bought Travis a couple replacement batteries and a charger because his battery wasn't holding a full charge. I was going to give them to him on Wednesday, but I still had them in the house. So I took out my Pre's battery, put in a charged replacement battery, and my phone came back to life!

At that point, Jeff cancelled the forwarding, so that calls would again come to my Pre. So, in about a 90-minute period after taking my call, Jeff had:

-- Found an answer to my original question about the "reserve in store" button
-- Realized that it wasn't a satisfactory answer and started looking for a solution
-- Called me back with a solution that got my new phone ordered
-- Tried to help with my old phone, leading to a solution to that problem

And all the while he was friendly and chatty, telling me he worked just down the road near LaCrosse, Wisconsin, had been out ice-fishing already, etc., etc. By the time we were done, he had solved every phone issue I had, and now - only about 24 hours later - I'm sitting with my new HTV EVO 4G.

I don't know how he could have made this interaction any better, short of personally fetching the phone from the warehouse in Kentucky, driving it up to my home himself and waxing my car once he got here.

It was a phenomenal customer service experience, and it's a shame that it's so rare these days that it merits a blog post. So, Jeff....thanks, man.

Just because it's fun

For about 18 months back in the '80s, I lived on Capitol Hill in D.C., where neighborhood parking was always at a premium. So I can relate to the reaction this driver had when he saw a parking spot that was just the right size for his car. I can't condone it, but I can relate, and I post it here just for the comedic value. Enjoy.

Why I remember Pearl Harbor

Today, of course, is Pearl Harbor day, the 70th anniversary of Japan's sneak attack that more or less launched the U.S. into World War II.

There are a few historical events that I consider myself pretty well versed on. From the time I was young, the Kennedy and Lincoln assassinations fascinated me, and I've read virtually everything I could get my hands on about those two events. (FYI - Oswald did it, and did it all by himself. Every other theory is crap.)

Another is Pearl Harbor, though I can't really take credit for it. Credit goes to a wonderfully gifted history teacher from Princeton High School named Pete Finelli.

We moved to Princeton after my freshman year, and U.S. History was a required sophomore course, taught by Finelli. I'd always enjoyed American history (see this entry about the Landmark series of history books I read as a kid), and on the first day of class, Finelli asked the class a series of pretty basic questions about American history, designed - I guess - to gauge where the class' knowledge baseline was.

I must have had a large number of shy classmates, because I know I wasn't any smarter than most of them, but I ended up raising my hand a lot and answering most of the questions. After class, Finelli came over, noted that I had recently transferred into the district, and asked if I had taken American history the year before at my former school. No, I told him, I just read a lot about history, and he seemed to like that.

Over the next few years, we moved beyond a normal teacher-student relationship and became pretty good friends. It turned out that Pete not only shared my love of history, but of baseball as well. He had been a minor-league pitcher, and served as a) the pitching coach for the high school baseball team, b) a sports writer for the local weekly paper and c) the play-by-play guy for the local radio station. Talk about two guys having something in common.

(Slightly off-topic story: I was reading a biography of Red Sox great Ted Williams, and learned that his first wife had been from Princeton. The next day after class, I rushed over to Pete's desk, anxious to share my discovery with him, and maybe amaze or surprise him a bit. I showed him the passage and asked, "Did you know Ted Williams' wife was from here?" It didn't have the desired effect. "Yeah, Ted and I used to go fishing together in the off-season," Pete said.)

And one of Pete's favorite topics was Pearl Harbor. Each year he would spend an entire week lecturing and quizzing on Pearl Harbor, getting us ready for a great learning experience: Watching the movie Tora, Tora, Tora. This will be hard for my children to understand, but in the fall of 1971, there were no VCRs, DVDs, computer downloads, Netflix or any other means by which to watch a full-length, feature motion picture in a classroom.

Unable to bring the movie to the class, Pete figured out how to bring the class to the movie. He convinced the local theater owner to rent the movie and screen it for Pete's history class. Preparing for Tora, Tora, Tora day was a big production. In addition to teaching us all about the attack, Pete would prepare us for some of the film's cinematic shortfalls, such as the way white letters were used in the subtitles, and didn't show up very well with white naval uniforms in the background.

Come movie day, we had a prescribed path to walk the 8-10 blocks from the school to the theater. A small herd of 150 or so kids would make the hike, watch the movie, then trek back to the school by lunchtime. It was about a 10-day immersion in all things Pearl Harbor, culminating with the film, and I have to believe that every kid who graduated from PHS in those years could quote Japanese Admiral Yamamoto saying, "I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant, and filled him with a terrible resolve."

As I mentioned, Pete and I remained friends beyond the classroom years. I dabbled in radio, and he eventually brought me on as his stat guy for football broadcasts, and as a color guy for baseball broadcasts. When he stopped writing for the local paper, he helped me get hired there for my first real sportswriting job. We were even linked to another historical event: I was in Pete's RV, along with his family, on the way to the state Legion baseball tournament in New Ulm on August 8, 1974, when we had a flat tire just north of Mankato. While waiting for the tow truck, we listened on the radio to President Nixon's resignation speech, and enjoyed sharing an historic moment together.

Pete has now retired and lives in Rochester, but I never get past Aug. 8th or Dec. 7th on the calendar without remembering a terrific teacher and all-around good guy who worked very hard to make history come alive for his students.

The war on jobs

George Will is almost always worth reading, and the column you can read here is a typically strong one.

There are so many failures in the Obama administration that it's hard to select the biggest one. But certainly among the most egregious is its assault on job creation. Whether it's blocking the XL pipeline, having the National Labor Relations Board try to stop a Boeing plant in South Carolina or trying to block domestic oil exploration, Obama consistently pursues policies that deter job creation.

Will's column focuses on the effect the threat of a fully-implemented Obamacare program is having on job creation. Here's the money quote from a CEO:

“...employers everywhere will be looking to reduce labor content in their business models as Obamacare makes employees unambiguously more expensive.”

"Reduce labor content" means "not hiring as many people." That's the effect Obama is having on everyone who needs a job. Enjoy Will's column.

The Obama administration goes after freedom of the press

Of all the disgraceful appointments in the Obama administration, Eric Holder is probably the worst. Under his "leadership" the Justice Department has done things like dismissing a voter intimidation case it had already won because those doing the intimidating were members of the Black Panthers.

A bigger fiasco was Operation Fast and Furious, in which ATF agents allowed members of Mexican drug cartels to buy high-powered weapons, thinking that they could then "trace" the weapons and find out where they went. It went badly awry, they lost track of more than 1,000 guns and one of the guns was used to kill an American border agent.

Holder has done his best to stonewall a Congressional investigation into Fast and Furious, even going so far as to seal court records about the murder of the border agent.

As a result of Holder's bumbling, more than 50 members of congress have called for his resignation. His response: Tell the media to stop reporting it.

Yesterday, in this photo, Holder sticks his finger in the face of a reporter from the political website The Daily Caller and says, “You guys need to — you need to stop this. It’s not an organic thing that’s just happening. You guys are behind it.”

Imagine if a member of the Bush administration had told a reporter to stop writing about a subject he found uncomfortable. The cries of "fascism" would be deafening.

I don't think even Nixon was this paranoid about the media. You can get a thorough description of Fast and Furious here.

(Afterthought: I just noticed the expression on the face of Holder's aide standing on his left. She's thinking, "Uh-oh...time to update the resume, because this gravy train is about to come to an end.")

Newt on the rise

From the very time the Republican field began to form itself last year, my first choice for President in the entire group was Newt Gingrich, but I had convinced myself - as many others had - that Newt was simply unelectable.

As he rises in the polls, and seems prepared to emerge as the only credible opponent of Mitt Romney, I find myself rethinking that assumption.

Gingrich has been my favorite political figure since Reagan left the scene. In the 1980s, when I served on Sen. Boschwitz's staff, the conventional wisdom was that a Republican majority in the House of Representatives was simply unattainable. The Democrats had controlled the place since 1952, and the entire infrastructure of the House - members, staff, committee staff, everything right down to the janitors - had been controlled by the Democrats for a generation. A Republican majority was simply unthinkable.

Except to Newt, Vin Weber, Connie Mack, Dan Coats and a few other bright young lions who called themselves the "Conservative Opportunity Society." Unlike more senior Republicans in the House, who more or less accepted the permanent Democrat majority, Newt and his colleagues went to work, using the Reagan years to build public support for conservative ideas and set about the business of attracting candidates whom they hoped could someday provide a Republican majority.

They fought the battle on a lot of fronts. They recruited stronger candidates, then found innovative ways to train the candidates and provide some funding. They targeted resources on swing districts, and they slowly made gains, aided by an organization they founded and called GOPAC.

In 1992, I was one of their candidates. Running in Minnesota's First District, I listened to the training tapes GOPAC sent out every week. I took part in the conference calls, and I went to their candidate school in Washington. And while I had simply admired Newt before that year, it was in 1992 that I began to fully recognize his genius.

Newt has a way of taking almost any issue and turning it back into a values question. Instead of asking the question, "Should we cut welfare programs?" Newt would phrase the question as "How do we tear down a system that limits an individual's potential and leads to generations of dependence, and replace it with a system that allows each individual a chance to realize their fullest potential." He had candidates all over the country talking about "Breaking down the bureaucratic welfare state" and replacing it with an "opportunity society." He wasn't afraid to call, for example, the Detroit public schools "a particularly tragic example of the human cost of protecting unionized bureaucracy at the expense of serving the public."

During my campaign, I was always working more Newt talking points into my speeches. I'd talk about how "Earning by Learning," a volunteer-based inner city literacy program, worked better than 20 years of Title 1 funding, and I'd see people in the audience nod. Or I'd talk about Health Savings Accounts (a really radical idea in 1992) as a way to make the necessary re-connect between the consumers and the payers of health care, and people would come to me to say how much sense the idea made to them. Newt and GOPAC gave all of us the tools to compete.

Some of those GOPAC candidates succeeded in 1992, others didn't. (I was one who didn't...another story for another day.) But all of us who fought the fight were inspired by Newt's vision of a Republican House majority that could begin to roll back the cancers eating away at America. I still keep a letter I have from Newt, expressing his condolences on my loss.

Two years later he authored the "Contract With America," a series of 10 changes he promised the American people would be made within 90 days of the election of a Republican House majority. The Republicans rode the Contract - and the fecklessness of Clinton's first two years - into the Republican House majority that almost no one thought was possible.

Two things stand out if you get to know Newt at all. First, he has an absolute love of America, and believes in his heart that this country has a special duty to lead the world. "Without an America that is strong, and safe, and free," he said, "The world becomes a very dark and dangerous place."

Secondly, you learn right away that he has a world-class intellect, and that he is an incredibly fast learner when presented with a new idea or new perspective that addresses an old question. And I think the long series of debates over the past few months have given voters a window into exactly how sharp a thinker Newt is.

Does he have flaws as a candidate? A mountain of them. His personal life has been messy, to say the least. There have been poor decisions, incorrect opinions and hundreds of moments I'm sure he'd like to take back. In recent years, he hasn't always been the most conservative guy around, but I'm confident of this: As President, he will tackle every issue head-on, speak truthfully to the American people and never, ever apologize for the United States of America.

As I said at the top, I had sort of fallen into the "trap" of thinking that all of his baggage made him unelectable, and when his campaign staggered out of the gate, I decided I was right. But a steady diet of his debate performances and increased exposure to his thinking seem to be bringing Republican primary voters around.

I have no doubt that if he is the Republican nominee, he will beat Obama, and probably do so in a landslide. The contrast between his upbeat, innovative vision of what America can become and Obama's view of an America that needs to recede from the world and manage its own decline will give Americans a very real choice that I believe they'll embrace.

The Scholastic Book Club

A few blog posts ago, (click here) I reminisced about the beauty of the Landmark series of American history books for children. Today, I was reminded of another great contribution to children's reading, The Scholastic Book Club.

The reminder comes via this blog post, written by Roger Kimball, who talks about a Washington Post book reviewer name Michael Dirda. Dirda has a new book out, and in it he recalls the incredible joy he would feel as a child when it came time to order from the Scholastic Book Club:

Each month Mr. Jackson would pass out a four-page newsletter describing several dozen paperbacks available for purchase. “Lying on my bed at home,” Drida recalls, “I lingered for hours over these news print catalogues, carefully making my final selections.”

The care was dictated in part by the budget imposed by Dirda’s mother, who stipulated a monthly budget of no more than 4 of the 25-35-cent books. Each month, Mr. Jackson sent in the class order. “Then in the middle of some dull afternoon, … a teacher’s aide would open the classroom door and silently drop off a big, heavily taped parcel. … Sometimes we would be made to wait an entire day, especially if the package had been delivered close to the three o’clock bell when school let out.”

But sooner or later, the swag was distributed and then Dirda, like his classmates, would

methodically appraise each volume’s art work, read and reread its back cover, carefully investigate the delicate line of glue at the top edge of the perfect bound spines. … To this day I can more or less recall the newsletter’s capsule summary that compelled me to buy The Hound of the Baskervilles. … “What was it that emerged from the moor at night to spread terror and violent death?” What else, of course, but a monstrous hound from the bowels of hell?

I had the same experience, over and over again, when those little Scholastic Book Service order forms came out, and the same argument with my dad over how many I could buy. I'm not sure Hound of the Baskervilles was ever one of my selections, because I was given that and other Sherlock Holmes books by a relative, but I know that over the years I ordered dozens and dozens of those little paperbacks, and I don't ever remember being disappointed by any one of them. There were many, many sports books, of course, and I was also quite taken with the exploits of a bright young kid named Encyclopedia Brown, who was great at solving mysteries.

The story also struck a chord with John Hinderaker over at Powerline, who wrote this about his experience growing up in Watertown, S.D in a post titled "The Most Exciting Box in the World."

But it seems like yesterday: our teacher would, as Roger says, pass out a newsletter or catalog that listed and described the books available for order. I pored over that catalog for hours, studying the descriptions and wondering about the books. I would carefully make my choices after discussing them with my friends–you may say that I was a little weird, but I wasn’t the only one, to paraphrase John Lennon–and some weeks later the box would arrive.

It was the highlight of the year. Better even than Christmas, because this box didn’t contain underwear or socks; it contained only books–not only that, but the books we had chosen ourselves. The minutes in which the box was opened and the books were distributed to the kids who had ordered them were the most exciting of my youth.

I know the Scholastic Book Club still exists, although I'm not sure if it still distributes books the same way or if the Internet has taken over the process, but it was an incredible part of my childhood. Daughter Corrie, now a librarian, apparently inherited the same love of reading, and the gene appears to have been passed on to the grandkids as well, which is one of the few of my traits that I hope they have.