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Davis Young
- Jun 22, 2021

DY: In Just a Few Words (#36)

I had to leave Ohio to make this dream come true.

We were part of a small group a few years ago that spent two weeks touring the fascinating North African country of Tunisia. You learn a great deal when you go to a country that is very different from what you’re used to seeing and doing at home. In Tunisia, mosques are everywhere. Some dress western. Some dress traditional middle-eastern. You experience new foods. Those differences are a principal reason many people never seem to go anywhere. They’re afraid to try something new. On the other hand, my wife and I embrace a change in cultures. For us, it’s working pretty well so far as we have been to more than 50 countries.

An example of a different experience is that Tunisia was the first place I ever rode a camel. Not the last, but it was the first. Never once in Ohio have I climbed aboard a camel for a ride on the Ohio desert. But, fearless rookie that I was, I joined a band of hearty Americans that, one step at a time, set out to explore the mighty Sahara desert. Just as a contribution to travel trivia, the Sahara is the largest desert in the world and it includes parts of 10 African countries.

The Tunisian piece of the Sahara starts at the very bottom of the country where there are a couple of what I would call border towns. The country doesn’t stop there, but civilization does. You climb aboard a large beast, head south and immediately start traversing the up and down sandy terrain we have all seen in photographs. Within minutes from where you started small towns and people are out of sight. The camels just keep heading for the next up and down of the sand. You are as lost as you would be if somebody dropped you into a remote corner of the South Pole. Fortunately, there is a guide to keep everyone headed in the right direction. But, even if your guide succumbs to heat stroke, keep the faith - your camel knows his way home. Camels are not celebrated for their smarts, but in my experience they are at least as accomplished as the average fifth grader.

So, I learned a lot in Tunisia both about camels and about myself. Today, I am a very good camel rider - perhaps not world-class yet - but at least more worldly than I used to be. I conquered the mighty Sahara (AKA I survived the mighty Sahara). I went on to ride camels on a second trip to that region (Egypt), but we’ll talk about that another time.

Something else I learned in Tunisia is to not count out the progress North African and Middle Eastern countries have made to move forward within the boundaries of their cultures. For example, Tunisia was owned by the French until it was granted independence in 1964. At that time, there were 700 college students in Tunisia. When we were there in 2008, there were 365,000. Pretty impressive growth, don’t you think? In the capital of Tunis, you see students everywhere on their way to school. Traveling in groups, you cannot avoid noticing that some of the females wear burkas with faces covered and only small slits to see through, some are in conservative western outfits with a traditional Muslim scarf, and some wear mini-skirts like you would see in Paris. It would be a big mistake to ever count these folks out. There are a lot of very bright people in that part of the world and they work every day to balance their rich tradition with global change that can be very unsettling.

Tunisia is where the Arab Spring originated - a vast uprising just a few years ago of citizens who have been held back by their own leaders and who believe their time has come.

You might want to think about what you can do to expand your own experiences. There is a larger world out there for all of us. Go see it. Go experience it. Go talk to people who speak a different language. Break bread with Bedouin nomads at their desert home. And, if you just happen to be in the neighborhood, hop on a camel for a ride on the Sahara. Experiences like that have changed my world for the better...much better.

DY: In Just a Few Words is a blog that comes out when something needs to be said or every Tuesday - whichever comes first. Davis Young is a communications professional who adds 50+ years of experience and perspective to issues of the day. His emphasis in DY: In Just a Few Words will be humor (a touch of sarcasm here, a pinch of facetiousness there...). Once in a while, he will touch on something a bit more serious - but hopefully not too deep or depressing.

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Davis Young
- Jun 15, 2021

DY: In Just a Few Words (#35)

It just doesn't get any better than this!

Don’t you just love customer service these days? I know I sure do.

I’ve been wanting to write a blog about customer service for some time. This is Blog #35 and I simply can’t kick the can down the road any more. I need to address this topic. And, my editor says I need to keep it light when I do. You’ll be fielding a lot of complaints if you don’t and the last thing you want to have to do is to spend time on the phone defending yourself with an unhappy reader who threatens to cancel her free subscription to your blog.

There are a lot of people who get angry when the term Customer Service is mentioned. Not me. I am never happier than when I am having a good two-way conversation with a well-trained person who has the authority to resolve my problem. Just last week, for example, my new toaster got stuck and reduced a piece of toast to the size of a quarter. Look at the upside. I’ll never put on weight eating toast the size of a mini-appetizer. There’s always something positive in every experience.

But, I digress. Back to my interaction with the toaster customer service person. I had been told by a neighbor that I might have to call 10 or 12 times before anyone would answer the phone. As it turns out, that was wrong and unfair to the toaster company. I was able to get right through after only seven calls. If you would be willing to take a brief survey at the end of this call, please stay on the line.

I really wanted to take their survey so I did what they requested - and I decided to stay on the line as long as necessary. They were making a sincere effort to learn about my experience and the least I could do was help them out. Two hours and 52 minutes later, the customer service rep came on the line. It wasn’t as bad as you might think as I was able to listen to some really good music during the delay. I apologize for the brief wait. I care about you and your toaster very much and I want to help you. I mean how great is that? That’s my kind of company and I’m going to talk to my new best friend.

I explained my problem and she put me on hold. When she reappeared just 46 minutes later, she introduced me to a second person who, as it turned out, was from a foreign country. He had a very heavy accent and was hard to understand, but I finally figured out he was from the nation of Alabama. I enjoy overseas travel so, for me, talking on the phone with a customer service rep from a country like Alabama can be a lot of fun. I care about you and your toaster very much and I want to help you. Right away he gained my trust. And, finally, here was somebody who had a good suggestion. Let me get you to one of our toaster pop-up experts here at our international toaster service center.

A mere 27 minutes later on comes a new voice. Please listen carefully as our options have changed. If you are calling because you have one of our Series 223 toasters, please press one. For all other reasons, remain on the line and one of our helpful customer service representatives will be on shortly. And sure enough - in just a short 38 additional minutes - on came someone saying, I care about you and your toaster very much. How can I help you today?

I know you are trying to help me, and I appreciate that a lot, but I really have to stop burning my toast and I am counting on you to help me reach that goal. When I push down on the timer handle it almost always gets stuck and sometimes the toast cooks for as long as 40 minutes before it finally pops up.

Sir, may I suggest that if you want to avoid this problem in the future that you may need to purchase one of our relational database management systems (commonly referred to as RDMS) for your toaster. If you do that and also replace your toaster’s hybrid app that should do the trick. A special feature comes with that which allows you to make different types of toast and put them up in the cloud for future consumption.

Just then we got disconnected. So, that’s how I spent my Tuesday. I made several new friends and renewed my faith in customer service. I hope you had a productive Tuesday, too.

Sadly, I’m afraid my toaster is toast.

And let me add that my options have changed, too. I don’t think I’ll write any more blogs about customer service.

Davis Young
- Jun 8, 2021

DY: In Just a Few Words (#34)

Oops!

I like to think of myself as being a generous person. Through the years, I have been fortunate to visit many places and I have often brought gifts for family members when I returned.

In 1985, I was sent to London on behalf of the State of Ohio which, at that time, was very interested in telling the story of why Ohio is such a good place to do business. In fact, that is still a story Ohio tells.

It was the Holiday Season, and I managed to find a little time in my important schedule to slip into the world-famous Harrods Department Store in London. Harrods is the 180 degree opposite of online shopping. Spread over seven floors in a gigantic 1,000,000+ square-foot building, more than 300 different departments offer a range of products from A-Z and back again. It is every bit as much a tourist attraction as it is a store.

At Harrods, I came upon a leased department under the brand name Salvatore Ferragamo. It was there that I fell in love with a magnificent scarf that I just had to buy as a Christmas gift for my daughter, Tracy. As I recall, the purchase price was 135 British pounds. That’s pretty pricey, except I calculated that American dollars were about 1-for-2 British pounds. So, I felt pretty good that the actual charge on my Mastercard would only be about $67 and change. I bought the scarf, left Harrod’s with a smile on my face and went back to my more important mission on behalf of the citizens of Ohio. It was only when my Mastercard bill arrived that I discovered my big mistake. Instead of cutting 135 British pounds in half to equal American dollars, I should have doubled them. Thus it was that my daughter received a $270 scarf that Christmas with instructions to never wear it, but to frame it as a fine piece of art.

A close cousin of that story comes from my first trip to Japan in 1984. I came upon a district in Tokyo known as Akihabara. It is the center of the universe for consumer electronics. Floor after floor, store after store of nothing but geeky stuff I don’t understand but which I know is important to the way the world works. I revisited Akihabara in 2013 and the only thing that had changed was that the electronics were far advanced and the product offerings much more sophisticated than in 1984. If you want to bring home a gift and have people think you are really a geeky dad, do your shopping at Akihabara.

It’s important for kids to think their parents are really with it, that they have the coolest mom or dad in town. I know my kids still feel that way as they struggle to have their own offspring know how lucky they are to have hip parents who play their music and video games. With that in mind, how could I leave Tokyo and Akihabara without a gift for Denny?

What should I get for that fine young man? I settled on a boombox, a large, clumsy thing long gone from our lexicon and store shelves, but a must have for every kid in the mid-1980s. Boombox was the perfect name as that thing sure was loud. And I was a cool dad, right?

About a week after I got home, I needed an Akihabara fix. I ventured over to a local discount store called Uncle Bill’s to see what electronics were on their shelves. Lo and behold there was an exact duplicate of what I had purchased for Denny. And the price tag was several dollars less than I had paid in Japan. What a discovery! I had schlepped that obnoxious boombox through airports just to find out I could have purchased the exact same item for less just a few blocks from my house.

The lesson to be learned from these two long-remembered experiences is that father doesn’t always know best. In fact, in my case, I think I need adult supervision if I am going into a store.

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