April 30, 2008Earlier this morning I received an email from Jeff, a very friendly customer service representative who works for Valspar Paint. Apparently, a concerned reader forwarded my post about Jared's purple office straight to the source and Valspar is itching to fix our contractor's color-matching faux-pas.
I'd like to thank the reader who forwarded my post to Valspar. They obviously read my blog quite regularly and know full-well that I'm too lazy, too dumb, and--I'll say it again--too lazy to email the company myself. Seriously, I am. We were just planning to airbrush a couple of unicorns on the purple wall and call it good. Now I guess we don't have to.
Valspar has offered to color-match the paint at company headquarters, ensure that it's exact, and send it to Jared's office free of charge. Well, they didn't mention the 'free of charge' part, but now that I wrote it for thousands of people to see, I'm hoping they'll catch my drift.
After living in Maine for the past few months, I'm simply not used to getting any customer service whatsoever. Generally, when you call a business in Maine and ask for their services the person on the phone will let out a long, disgruntled sigh and ask how you got their name. And usually they don't want to thank the person who referred you to their business, they want to kick their ass.
Yesterday, I kid you not, we called a wrecker to tow the Blazer sometime around, oh I don't know, 11am? And a few minutes before 7pm, the driver finally decided to show. His dog pooped in our yard, he left a cigar butt in our driveway, and kindly accepted our check for a-hundred-and-something dollars. Gotta love it.
And do you know what my husband is doing today? He's camped out by a state office, trying to get his hands on his chiropractic license. After six weeks of waiting he decided to take matters into his own hands. He called to give me an update:
Lady: What are you doing here?
Jared: I'd like to pick up my license.
Lady: You should call first.
Jared: I've called four times, no one ever calls me back.
Lady: Well it take two weeks to process a license.
Jared: It's been six.
Lady: Oh. Sit here for a few hours, I'll see what I can do.
So thank you Valspar, thank you for the outstanding customer service. From this point forward, I will use your paint in every room of my home. And if I ever get the urge to paint my body silver and pose for the cover of Vanity Fair, you can bet your ass I'll use your product for that purpose too.
9 comments:
Here's what I want to know, Amy. When do I reach the level of blogger where companies start sending me free crap? Because dude, I would sell out SO FAST for a free Ipod. Or even free cookies. I'm easy like that.
(Psssst.... Hey, Valspar! I have a blog. And I need to paint some stuff. Call me.)
Gotta love the power of blogging!
Maybe Jared will get his license quicker if someone fwd's this - although somehow I don't think the govt cares about customer service.
Thanks for the comment, I know how busy you are so its ok :)
While we're on the subject, here's my favorite lack-of-customer-service story: my husband, my 18-month-old son, and I went on a trip. We booked a motel, making a note that we needed a portable crib in our room. When we got there, there was no crib. This conversation followed:
Paul: Could we please get a crib in our room?
Motel Employee: No.
Paul: Sorry?
Motel Employee: I don't want to set it up. You should have asked me before the housekeeping staff left and I would have made them do it."
I think you got ripped off by the tow truck guy, unless he's towing your blazer to Florida! Up here in Bangor it costs 40 bucks for a tow, dog poop optional. :-)
Hope Jared was successful in getting his license.
Are you guys sure that the Mafia didn't tow your car away? Because that amount sounds *a little* steep to me. Unless you are living off the coast on an island...
Congratulations on scoring free paint. Awesome!
Paint the tow truck with the purple paint and dump the rest over the mean license lady's head.
I'm just a lurker here, finally commenting... you lucky girl... scoring free stuff!!!
I would totally be someones publicity whore, if they gave me free stuff...
Love your blog! Makes my day!
Shawn insists that his fleece vest is blue when it is clearly purple. He'd probably be interested in the leftover paint!
Awesome. Maybe you can help us with our Panasonic digital camera that takes video . . . . . . . but no audio.
Unfortunately, by the time we sat down to watch our (silent) videos it was too late to send the camera back.
The customer service rep from panasonic didn't even believe me when I told her that our camera PURPOSELY took silent videos. She called me back later to tell me that it was, indeed, designed to take silent videos, and that I should have known that.
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