Week Three – New Business

Week Three

Besides my friendship with Josh who is doing a whole lot of landscaping in Lubbock (actually I should say that he is doing a lot of Lubbock lawn care for yards heading into the fall and winter months) I have become friends with a guy named Kurt, who does all kinds of handyman work for several corporate housing groups all around the South Plains. He told me that he doesn’t think he has much to offer to the group as far as teaching anything, but he is going to give it a go in a few weeks. He is going to talk about successfully dealing with difficult and impatient customers who are domineering and demanding. I told him that this was going to be a very valuable teaching since everyone in the group has to deal with customer service to a lot of people who complain about everything no matter if everything is being done correctly. Kurt told me that he recently dealt with a woman at one of his assigned sites who wanted him to fix her toilet that she said was always getting stuck. After taking a look at her toilet (which I am sure was a total joy), Kurt messed with the internal workings of this fine contraption and jiggled things around a bit. He put in a lot of toilet paper in the bowl (which made the woman steaming mad for wasting her valuable toilet tissue) and he flushed it. It worked perfectly. Again and again, Kurt tried to get the toilet “to get stuck” as was the complaint and it never would. It flushed normally, but the woman refused to let him go that easily. In fact, she berated him for just being lazy and trying to get out of this job so quickly. He told me that despite his internal anger at the woman for her actions, he calmly asked her to accompany him into the bathroom and to show him how he could fix something that was currently. He showed her what he had done on the inside (which was not much since none of it was broken) and asked her to think of when the toilet tends to get stuck. He also asked her if she happened to try to flush anything besides paper and waste into the toilet. She was livid but Kurt’s calmness and even care for her situation kept things from being explosive (a word that you might not want to think of in dealing with toilets). Just then, Kurt saw three cats moving around in the hall and he immediately thought of their litter boxes. He asked the woman if she changed all three of their litter boxes on the same day and she said yes. He asked if he could look at the litter boxes and when he did he saw that they were overflowing with kitty litter and other fun surprises. He immediately knew what was going on – the woman was dumping three full litter boxes into the toilet each week and it was clogging her system. He asked if he could check and see if this was right. Flustered, he said yes and just as Kurt thought, the toilet stopped up. The woman did not say thank-you but instead just complained that Kurt had wasted not only her toilet paper but now a lot of kitty litter. Kurt just smiled and said he was sorry about it all. He used his plunger to remove this current clog and made sure the toilet was working correctly. Then, he thanked her and left. But Kurt didn’t just stop at that – He immediately went to the grocery store and bought the woman a 24-pack of toilet paper and a large case of kitty litter. When he delivered it to her corporate housing space, the woman actually started crying and apologizing to him for being so cross. As it turned out, she had just lost her husband to cancer and had replaced her sorrow with anger. She thanked him for his kindness and patience. Kindness and patience kill off a lot of complaint. This was the case study that Kurt was going to use when he talks to us in a few weeks. I was amazed at how his attitude and generosity had calmed the storm and encouraged him that this would be a powerful lesson. He thanked me and we got a late breakfast after the group concluded. Once again, I am happy that I am making friends with people of this sort. Good guys…

I forgot to mention that I also made friends with a woman named Liz who is running a local Lubbock catering business that is connected to a larger corporation.  She will be mentioned in the rest of my blogs because of her influence on me and Josh.  Her name is Liz.