Saturday, August 15, 2009

Reasons My Head Explodes

Well, yesterday sucked, but not for the amusing, my-customers-are-so-fucking-dumb-and-I’m-so-fucking-smart reasons of prior posts.

“Hey, I got a call that the stuff for my tubeless conversion is in, so here’s the bike. Will it take long?”

Pause while head explodes. My disarticulated jaw, now lying under the bench near the truing stand, apologizes for covering the customer in completely pissed off cranial detritus. See, we’ve got the valves, but the rim strips shipped from Jersey, which takes two to four days longer than if they ship from Wisco. I knew this. I knew we didn’t have everything in place. Had I been consulted, we could've avoided this situation, but in our giddy anticipation of Pleasing The Customer, we jumped the gun. So now, rather than Pleasing The Customer, widely considered by industry mavens to be Good Business, we have dropped the ball. Again. This is widely considered Bad Business.

Did I mention this was the third, count it, third, time we had dropped the ball on this customer. She owns a Fisher HiFi Pro. Full XTR, Juicy Ultimates, etc. It’s a nice bike. First, we dropped the ball on her brakes. They were sucking, and for some reason, the problem remained unsolved until I took over and fixed them. Then, she was having horrendous chain suck, which had turned her driveside chainstay into something resembling a large diameter, carbon-fiber pipe cleaner. Again, problem unsolved until I took over. Now this. Why she continues to humor my pathetic shop is beyond me. Maybe she pities us. Maybe she gets a tax write-off for spending money at the Shop of the Cognitively Disabled. Who the fuck knows?

So now I get the joyful job of explaining to this patient and generous customer that we have dropped the ball again.

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