Customer Service Par Excellence!

I have a fantastic story of customer service, folks.

Every year about this time, we order gifts for our grandkids (as do millions of other grandparents). What we have chosen to do is give gifts from online companies offering toys and such for kids with a scientific or educational theme. Brain teasers, science kits, puzzles, etc., all age specific.

The company we have settled on is one called Mindware.

This year, we ordered as usual, and one of the items we ordered had two separate boxes, one for patterns, and one for pictures. A magnetic mosaic kind of thing. The online catalog had three different order numbers, with one being for both boxes. We got that one.

But when the order came today, someone had mistakenly put two of the same type into the shipping box, meaning we didn't have the second one, for patterns.

So, we called their customer service to correct the error, expecting to get a return authorization and shipping label to return the wrong box.

Nope, didn't happen. Instead, as she set up the order to have the correct item shipped to us in just three days, she told us to DONATE the mis-shipped item!

Yes, you got that right, they are allowing us to keep the item that was sent by mistake, on the proviso that we donate it to a charity that will give it to a needy child for Christmas!

We have decided to donate it to Toys for Tots, run by the US Marines, which is being collected at my office this year.  (Every year, in fact)

THANK YOU, MINDWARE!!!

I am SO impressed by this company, I want all of you to share this story, because for a company to actually push donation as a solution to this kind of error is unheard of, and I think a wonderful solution it is!

Educational toys, learning toys for kids & children | MindWare Toys

www.mindware.com

MindWare is proud to be the best resource for educational toys, toys for education and learning toys for kids and children that engage and entertain. Your children will learn 

Another Guest Post!

Hey, folks, have I got a treat for you!

Cyberdaughter the Youngest has written another guest post.  Not a story like the last time, but a short piece on her love of books and how it affects her.  It is a wonderful little snippet, but well worth the time to read - more than once!

Books

Sometimes when I am reading just the right passage in a book, I feel as though I can reach out and touch the words. I can peel them off of the page like a sticker and adhere them on to the world around me and see, for a time, their meaning in everything that touches me. The words blend seamlessly in to my perceptions and for just a little while I am changed. Everything around me is suddenly awash with sensation, beauty, meaning... 

I feel more alive at these moments. I feel full and heavy and secret. I feel special and alone. For a few minutes, days, or even weeks, I am looking out at everything in a new and wonderful way. I move slower, I see more clearly the things that I often take for granted. Even the simple act of making myself a cup of coffee is full of moments that I never noticed before. I am more open to the people around me - the ones that I know and love and also the strangers that pass by normally unnoticed. It's as though they are wearing their stories like a cape or a blanket and in order to look them in the eye I have to read them all. Thoughts and meanings and words and strands of time weave around them and I almost feel as though I can run my fingers through them the same way I would run my fingers through my own hair; soft, silky, and intensely personal. Familiar. They are stories that I already know but had forgotten, the memory of them teasing at me as I take them in. They linger. A car drives past and the driver's stories reach out to me and settle gently around me as though the car drove through a patch of dust and left me covered in it, breathing in the cloud. It's a peaceful feeling, like having a silken sheet drift down to cover my naked body over and over again; it's always there, but I hardly notice it unless it moves. 

It fades after a while. The passage lingers until I once again forget in the face of every day motion. The sticker of words fades and peels, the edges are rough and the letters are barely legible after a while, but it never entirely leaves me. Some small piece, a tiny bit of paper, a letter, a feeling - it stays with me and becomes a part of my world. I cherish these pieces; they are my foundation. Hundreds upon thousands of these minuscule moments are embedded in my thoughts and perceptions. If I concentrate, I can pull one up and unfold it and cradle it and cherish it and be awash with the meaning of it for a while, but most often they are an accident. A moment, a thought, a bit of sun that looks just like it did that afternoon so many years ago. A shout in the distance, the splash of water, a scent, or a flavor of the past will catapult my senses back to those tiny, faded letters and for just a little while I am caught in its web once more. It is like my mind is pulling at the threads that make up my self and showing me for just a moment that I have not forgotten, that it is still there, that it is a part of who I am and always will be. That feeling is like the sun on a lazy afternoon. I bask in it, I close my eyes and smile to the sky until the clouds eclipse the rays of warmth and I return to my normal, whole self again, made up of all the faded words and feelings and stories so deeply woven with each other that they are scarcely separate letters anymore.

 Sometimes, being a parent is so worth it!

Slow News Day!

Hey, it happens.  Some days, there just isn't anything exciting.

I mean, all the Senate did was to cut off debate on the Hagel nomination.  Yawn.....

Or, maybe... the Pope resigns Thursday!  (He'll be called Pope Emeritus, can still wear white, although plain so as to not show up the new guy, and he'll have to give up his red shoes...)   <rubs eyes>

The Coast Guard is now upset after having spent hundreds of thousands of your tax dollars looking for a shipwrecked family off the coast of California that turned out to be a hoax...ho, hum...

The middle of the country is buried under a foot and a half of snow...

The CEO of Yahoo! has told her employees that they can't work from home at all any more...

Apple is on the way to settling another lawsuit...

Apple's shares are back up after rumors of a stock split...

The Game of Thrones season 3 trailer is out...

Chris Christy is the eighth State governor to agree to expand Medicare and sign onto the Health Care expansion under "Obamacare"...

We had biscuits and chili for supper tonight!

I know, I always save the best for last!

An Indelible Impression.

I've watched a number of inaugurations in my day.  I think Kennedy was my first where I knew what was happening.  That gives you bean counters out there something to go on!

Today was historic for a number of reasons, and not only because the first black man elected to office became one of a few Presidents to take the oath of office a second time.  Seventeen, I think they said the number was.

I have to say that for me, the most indelible moment was after it was done, and the Presidential Party was exiting the podium area.  The main camera out front was filming his exit, and caught him as he entered the doors into the building, where, normally, you would begin to lose sight of him.

At that moment, he stopped and turned around.  Not to talk to the crowd, but to look behind him, down the Mall.  I know that he'd just finished a 19 minute speech where he stood out there in front and addressed that crowd, but this was special - a private moment in the middle of a crowd for a very public man.

Take a look.

At that moment, he took the opportunity to do what I would have been tempted to do - to take that last possible chance to look back, to savor a moment that very few human beings get to see - hundreds of thousands, if not a million people or more - come to see you.  To know, in those few moments that all of the hoopla, all the pageantry, all the attention of the day, was focused on nobody else but you.

And he wanted, in a very human way, to stop and take a look at something he will remember for the rest of his life.  This is the highlight, the pinnacle of his career.  Never again will this many people come to one place to see him.

It seems he wanted to take some of that away with him.

Good for you, Mr. President!  You worked for it, you deserve it.  Savor it, let it roll slowly through the memory spaces of your mind for as long as it takes.

Congratulations.