Jester, Her Chair and the Unusual Customer

I nearly fell off my chair on Wednesday...

Actually, let's rewind that and make it a bit more dramatic...

I fell off my chair on Wednesday. I'm a High Level or Complex Jester and deal with complaints that have been addressed to our Managing Director or Chief Executive Officer amongst other things. So, not unsurprisingly, I was asked to respond to a complaint on Monday from somebody who had decided to write to an Important Person at the Dark Satanic Mill.

I spoke to him briefly on the Monday and agreed to ring him back on the Wednesday because his toilet was going to be repaired on the Tuesday. He seemed a nice enough chap at the time.

So, on Wednesday, I rang him back and we chatted a while and I told him all the things I would do to make sure he would not receive such poor service next time (one of the things we could do is to remove some of contractors from our Network [but not the ones who read this blog!]). Mr Customer seemed quite confident that feeding his issues back to the relevant managers (I'm really getting the hang of Mill Newspeak now) would have the desired effect and so we turned to the thorny issue of Com-pen-sa-tion. We call it the C-word - a little in-joke for jesters all over the English-speaking world.

I offered an amount, not much, but a little higher than I thought his complaint merited. Going to the top ups the stakes usually. His answer left me speechless and on the floor, having fallen off my chair. He told me he did not want any money, he just wanted to know that we had done something about it.

I actually had to apologise for going silent and I was very honest with him. I told him that usually, when customers refuse a gesture of goodwill, it's because they don't think it's high enough. I had also gone silent because his answer had left me a bit short of breath with a funny fluttery feeling in my stomach. It is an unusual situation, you see, and I'm not well equipped to cope with it. I'm more used to having customers say things like "I'll see you in court" and some of them do actually carry out their threat, although they would probably be very disappointed not to see an insignificant little jester in the dock while the judge puts a black cap on his head and sentences her to a slow and painful death involving lots of money. I'm not sure who represents the Dark Satanic Mill at the Small Claims Court but it certainly not me or any of my fellow jesters.

Anyway, it was a pleasure to see a return to old values, you know the "I don't need money, it's just nice to know you're doing something about it" sort of thing.

I would also like to tell you that no chairs were harmed during the making of this blog.