Follow-Ups

I thought I should give you a few follow-up comments about some of my past posts.

First of all, I've gotten some good feedback on my "Riddle Me This..." posting. I'd suggest going back to that and reading the comments. There are some good -- and very plausible -- answers to my questions.

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Then, from my New Year's Resolution posting " 'Eat the Cake Please, People' ", I received a correction to my erroneous neighborhood location of Charm City Cakes.

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Mainly, though, I have a new story to tell about the post entitled "Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is." 

A couple of days ago, I received a call from the manager (Dan) of the local Apple store. He had received my online survey, and was calling to do his own follow up. I've been on that side of the phone before, where you have to make a call to an unhappy customer and try to placate them. Which put me in the weird situation of trying to point out my complaint, while also trying to not make him feel too bad about his staff.

We spent probably 10 or 15 minutes on the phone. Dan started out going along the "We were really busy on the day you were here" line of conversation, but when I reminded him that I have had bad Customer Service experiences every time I've been there, he started to listen a little more and ask more specific questions. There came a point where I was kind of apologizing for complaining, while he was almost bashing on how badly his staff had performed. (Yeah. That was a weird turn of events.) But it was a good phonecall, overall. 

Finally, toward the end, Dan asked if I'd like a free class in the store, and I had to laugh and say that as little as I enjoy the store, I couldn't imagine sitting at the "Genius Bar" for a half-hour without having an anxiety attack. But I have to say that I really appreciated the gesture. He eventually offered to send me an iTunes giftcard for my troubles, which I certainly wasn't expecting, but very much appreciated. I doubt that I'll be going into the Apple store any time soon, but at least now I've got a less-bad taste in my mouth about it.

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So, that should get you mostly caught up on what's going on around here. The Beef Wellington and Kouign Amann are long gone. We're still stocked up on Orange Juice and fighting off the end of our colds. But it's a sunny day and might actually be above 20 degrees before all is said and done. For mid-January, life is good.