Scuba Jim

How to and How Not to Handle Customers

2006-02-13T22:14:00.000-08:00

This past weekend was our 25th wedding anniversary and so I surprised my wife with a limo ride to some local wineries with 7 other couples. We have a lot of nice wineries in Oregon. Our group was 16 people all told in two limos.

Upon arriving at our second winery, Sokol Blossor, a very nice young woman came out of the tasing room and directed us to the deck. She said it was special for us, she wiped off the tables, a young man bought out a box of wine glasses. My wife asked me if I had called ahead to get this special treatment. I hadn't. The woman had seen our group arrive, saw that the tasting room was fairly full, and decided it was better to propose we sit outside, bring out glasses and in general facilitate us being outside than turn us away. She did the perfect thing. We had a wonderful time. The view was fantastic. They bought out wine for tasting and we bought some.

Later that day we ended up at Montinore Winery in Forest Grove. Montinore has a much larger tasting room. In the parking lot were three cars. As soon as we got out of the limo a lady came out and told us we had to leave. They couldn't handle such a crowd. (16 people?) We had been to Montinore before in our own cars - same number of people just more vehicals. Since we aren't out to cause trouble we piled back into the limos and left.

Guess which winery we are going to return to over the Labor Day weekend? Guess which winery we won't be buying wine from? Too bad. You wouldn't think an establishment would be so quick to put a bad taste in the mouth of so many people at the same time.

I have sent a rather nice letter to Sokol Blosser's management giving the young woman and man some kudos. Not an email an actual letter. It should have more impact. For Montinore I sent a polite letter and indicated our dissatisfaction.

It is very interesting to contrast the two ways of handling the same situation. I guess that is the difference between a sucessful operation and a mediocure one.

My Main Squeeze is going Web

2005-09-15T16:30:00.000-07:00

After decades of doing her business "the old fashioned way" - word of mouth. Barb is trying to post her skills on line. Go Barb! She has over 20 years of full time experience fabricating jewelry. She has made jewelry for little girls to A list rock stars and Hollywood Celebrities. (while she was employeed at another shop) After slaving away raising our two boys she is trying to make a more full time foray into doing repairs and creating jewlery for others. Here is her web site please visit it and drop her a line or give her a call if you need any work. She is very professional and loves nothing more than making a customer happy with a job well done. (and for a very reasonable price I might add.)
Thanks for your support.

Men are Puppies

2005-09-08T21:22:00.000-07:00

I as talking to a friend of mine about this woman he is friends with. We will call her Sue – not her real name. Sue is very smart and very attractive. He was telling me about the time Sue and he went to a bar with music and she was surprised that no one asked her to dance. Another time he invited some male friends to listen to a band and Sue came along. Of course, the male friends gave her a lot of attention. When the set was over he went to leave with her. (They are just friends.) You can imagine what happened. All the guys followed them out to the parking lot. The question was what’s next? Where do you want to go now? Sue couldn’t understand it.

Later he tried to explain it to her. He tried to explain that if she had asked them to lie down in the middle of the street so the bus would stop they would. If she had asked them to go kill that guy over there they would have asked “With a knife, gun, bat, what?” (not really, these guys aren’t violent.)

For all you women out there who are bright and attractive and you can’t figure out why you aren’t asked to dance in bars let me explain. Men are puppies. No really, they are. If you have a puppy and when you come home what does the puppy do? He rushes toward you, ears flapping, tail wagging, tongue lapping, and paws trying to grip the floor in his rush to get to you. As his paws scrape the floor in his desperate run to greet you he reminds you of an old boyfriend. Yes, men are puppies.

The reason you aren’t getting asked to dance isn’t because you aren’t good enough. No, quite the opposite, you intimidate the heck out of them. They don’t want to get shot down in flames. They don’t want to get scolded. Men are puppies.

Riding in a Blast Furnace

2005-07-27T21:04:00.000-07:00

Today was rather warm outside – 95 F (35 C). During these warm summer months I ride an iron horse to work. The ride home today was like riding into a blast furnace. I wear blue jeans and a full riding jacket. The jacket has armor in the back, shoulders, arms and elbows. So it is quite warm. I did open the cuffs on the sleeves and the vents in the front. When I am motoring at 60 MPH the air makes me feel I am the Michelin Man. The air rushes in the sleeves and the vents in the front and blows out the vents in the back; puffing me up like a balloon.

For those of you who have never driven a motorcycle I can highly recommend taking the motorcycle safety course. It is two and a half full days and includes the use of a helmet, a motorcycle, course material, and training. It will also give you an appreciation of what riding.

It would be nice to wear shorts and a T-shirt but I am not in the mood to get road rash and feel rocks hit my unprotected body at up to 60 miles/hour (100 Kilometers/hour). Part of my route to work is past a couple of rock quarries, where trucks haul aggregate all the time. Also if I fall I want that jacket to give me some abrasion and impact protection. I hope to never fall.

How to prepare an exchange student?

2005-07-26T22:14:00.000-07:00

We are going to host a Japanese exchange student from a private high school this year. We don't know much about him yet. We understand he wants to teach elementry school in the future. In the past we have "winged" it; this time I think it might be nice to formalize our introduction, rules, expectations a little bit. I want to improve the process a little bit. Our past experiences have not been failures, far from it, but getting started on the right foot is important.

We have hosted students from Japan, Taiwan, and China for five years on a short three week program. That is a great way to start. You can get a taste and if you don't like it the meal is short. If you don't think you could last for three weeks then I wouldn't even consider signing up for it. Most of the short programs are geared to English as a Second Language (ESL) classes during the week. So you only really have to entertain them in the evenings and the weekends. The evenings are fairly easy because they are mentally exhausted and often want to spend some time alone in their room.

The year program is more difficult, but the student grows so much more. For about the first three months they are drinking from a fire hose. Yes, they have taken four or more years of English, they had to score above a cut line on an ESL test and they are bright, but now English class is always on. This is not a one or two hour a day class, this experience is English bombardment! Things that can help are:

Turn on the closed captioning on the TV when watching and for movies. This helps them hear the words, see the actors, and read the words.
Take them to movies. Most movies are not that complex. You can usually get the gist of the movie just by what is happening. Here again you are reinforcing the language by sound and sight.
Don't take them to artsy fartsy movies or plays. Look I love Shakespeare and would like nothing more than sharing it with them. After all it is good literature. However, trying to watch Sir Larence Olivie play Hamlet isn't helping them with the language. Same goes for opera.
Get them to talk and encourage them. This can be difficult. Sometimes they have a natural tendency to not say anything for fear of mangling your language. This behavior might be cultural. Try to encourage them to talk and never make them feel uncomfortable if they "goof up". Remeber they are probably better at your language than you are at theirs.
Get them to go out for a sport at school; especially a team sport. They don't have to be good at it, but they should have fun. This strategy is to get them to talk to their peers. In all likelyhood they will be learning a new sport and the coach and their team mates will have to converse with them. It also gets the endorphins going and helps them to meet friends not from their country. The endorphins are important in the first few months because these are high school students (15 - 16 years old) and they are going to get home sick.
Include them in what you are doing. You might want to sometimes give them a choice. I had to put some things together and asked if they wanted to help.
So some special things with them. One year we had a girl student so I encouraged my wife to take her out with her girl friends when they got pedicures or did "girly" things. (coffe klatch et al) The things have to be appropriate; you wouldn't take a high school boy to a traditional batchelor party, but a baseball game would be fine.
Ask them questions that are directed. If you used a word that you don't not think they know ask them if they know what that word means. If they don't know, and they might not tell you unless you ask, then try to explain it to them. Don't over ask them. If you ask them too much then you are turning up the water coming out of that fire hose.
Try to not use too many expressions unless it would help to explain.
If you have children try to read to them every night. Read some book all of them will enjoy. Yes, include the exchange student. After about 4 months see if you can get them to read a page or two of the story. We usually pass the book around. I'll read 5 pages, then everyone else will read one page.

Around October and November they will get homesick. You may not notice. Put it on the calendar - discreetly or in code - and think of ways to take their mind off the home sickness. I really don't have a good idea for how to handle this.

I am looking for other questions, suggestions or comments. Go for it.

After looking at the title to this entry I thought of the old Twilight Zone episode called "How to Serve Man." Alians landed on Earth and gave us a wonderous book titled "How to Serve Man". It was in code, but they were so helpful to us that only a couple of people tried to decipher the book. In the end, in typical Rod Serling Twilight Zone fashion the joke was that the book was a recipie book on how to serve man. (eat man)...

What are Friends?

2005-07-24T15:26:00.000-07:00

We hosted a high school exchange student over the past year. It was a wonderful year; her English improved immensely, she always did her school work, she included herself in family activities, and was just a nice person. She was very quiet. She just didn’t say a lot. I don’t think it was because she was afraid to use her English; I had noticed with her Japanese friends she was the least talkative of the group. The day before she was set to jet home we were camping about 3 hours away from our house. To make sure she wouldn’t miss her flight I drove her home and would drop her off in the morning. It was a three hour drive in the early evening. I wasn’t going to sit there in silence for three hours and I wasn’t going to do ALL the talking for three hours. So I invented a game. The game was called “Ask a question.”. I got to ask her a question and then she got to ask me a question. I figured it was probably the last time I could have a conversation with her perhaps ever again. (I have never been to Japan and she doesn’t travel to the U.S.)

The “Ask a question” game was fun. Some of her questions must have been out of Teen magazine or something similar.

What would you want for your last meal?
If you only had 24 hours to live what would you want to do?
What is your favorite travel or vacation place?
What is your favorite book?
What is your favorite movie?

My questions weren’t any better, but we were having a conversation and the ride wasn’t boring. The book question was difficult. I love to read and there are a lot of books that I can and have read multiple times. I picked two that she had heard of. “The Lord of the Rings Trilogy” by JRR Tolkien and “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle.

We had read “A Wrinkle in Time” around the dinner table so she was familiar with it. Meg, the protagonist, is a teenager at that confusing age. She has not physically matured yet, but she is not a child anymore. She is at that awkward age. Her father has been gone for many years due to a top secret science experiment. She lives in a small town and is subjected to the Peyton Place effect. (rumors abound in a small town) Charles, her young brother, Calvin, a new friend, and her get swept off to Camazotz to find and rescue her father. Camazotz is a planet of mechanist efficiency and sameness. They sky is grey, and children bounce balls and jump rope in perfect unison. Anything out of place or cadence is subjected to “correction”. In the process of rescuing her father her brother gets trapped by IT. IT is the brain of the operation. IT has eliminated differences and conflict.

A mental tug of war ensues and Meg, Calvin, and Meg’s father flee the planet. Charles is left behind entwined in IT. Since Charles never knew his father Meg has to go back alone and rescue Charles. She is told that she must use her strengths and that she has something that IT doesn’t have. She mentally battles IT over Charles. She struggles to find what she has that IT doesn’t have. Finally, she finds the one thing that IT can’t supply, that IT can’t give; something that can only be freely given; never asked for nor taken. Love. She wins back Charles and they flee Camazotz.

So my question to Ayaka, was what did Meg have that IT didn’t have? What thing did Meg have that IT could never have. What thing has value beyond all else, but can’t be purchased, can’t be asked for? What one thing could you never buy at the mall? (I like to tease her about shopping because to her the US was inexpensive compared to Japan. If you come from the most expensive city in the world who wouldn’t think Portland Oregon was cheap!) What is perhaps the most valuable thing that you have gotten out of this year, but you can’t buy it, it can only be freely given? It took awhile, but she said friends.

So what is a friend? How do you know you have a friend? What happens when a friend is not a friend? How do friendships end? I agree with Steven Pinker’s Woody Allenesque observations in “How the Mind Works” that friends are people who like you despite of who you are. Friends are those people who reciprocate without keeping a score card and who you never feel you have to keep a score card for.

Friendship stops when the reciprocity becomes one sided for too long. At this point the receiver is either a fair weather friend, a friend only when it is to their advantage, or there is some codependent behavior going on. If one side is always giving and being abused by the other side then it is no longer a friendship; it is something else. Friendship can also end when the person no longer likes you despite who you are. Maybe your odd habits are annoying.

Often during the high school years you can observe a gaggle of girls who use “friendship” as a means of power over others. Often girls believe that any relationship is better than no relationship. This belief can be used to their detriment by some girls. You get the Odd Girl Out Behavior. Where a Queen bee will maintain and solidify her social standing in her peer group by putting one of the girls in the group “on the outs” for a week or so. You can’t keep the girl on the outs on the outs too long because she will just leave the social clique eventually. It would erode your power base over time. Instead the girl on the outs is on the outs until the queen picks another victim. Strangely enough the other girls don’t call the queen on this behavior but actually assist her in promulgating this abuse.

If you find yourself in this situation, run don’t walk from this group. The group’s power is only effective if you let it be. If you value having any relationship over having good relationships you will be prone to this abuse. Later in life you will see women exhibit this same behavior with abusive husbands. I agree with Ms. Simmons that the two behaviors are linked; that girls who are abused by other girls in yoyo relationships and don’t learn how to handle it have a propensity to be those same women who are abused by husbands. Men abusing wives is wrong. The abused women are victims, not perpetrators of the problem.

It is easier to know what to do than to do it. There is much pain associated with giving up a connection with a group even if their behavior is abusive. It is not an easy action. You can see the group’s struggle for power if you extricate yourself from their clutches. Isn’t it strange that if you are on the outs and you separate yourself from them they want you back? Why, if you were someone they don’t want to associate with – won’t let you sit with them at lunch, give you the silent treatment, roll their eyes at you, and a million other subtle things – would they do anything but rejoice if you left them? You leaving their group weakens their power. You take the wind out of their sails.

Good friends are priceless, fair weather friends are expensive. Even though it will hurt; your stomach will churn, you will have that feeling of awful loneliness and tiredness, that feeling as if you have been crying for hours, get rid of fair weather friends. They will suck the life out of you and prevent you from spending time with those who boost you, who give you joy and happiness, comfort, and reciprocate.