Hi, I’m Wayne Jones. Welcome to Newfoundland Boy, part personal memoir but mostly about the Canadian province of Newfoundland. This is episode 10: “Excellent Service vs. Don’t-Give-a-Fuck’edness.”
I’m not quite sure whether this is a thing or not, or whether it’s just a phenomenon that you find in any town or city. That is: sometimes you get good customer service when you buy something or pay for a service, and sometimes you don’t. Since I’ve moved to St. John’s, though, what I’ve noticed is the extremeness of it: the service is either so good that it restores your faith in humanity, or so bad that you wonder if there’s some kind of prank being pulled on you, or you’ve accidentally stumbled into a slough of ineptitude and indifference.
I’m happy to say that by far most of the service I’ve gotten has been in the excellent category. The first one I remember and that has always stuck in my mind is from the guy who did body work on my car. His office is just off the area where the bays are where they actually carry out the work on the cars. I talked to him briefly and told him what I needed done and then we went outside so that he could take a look at the car. He did some assessments on the spot and told me what would be a major issue, and what would be relatively simple work and then some repainting.
We walked back to his office and he sat down in the chair while I stood and waited. Then he took a pen and went at the calculations, head down, concentrating, not stopping till he was finished. It reminded me of someone at a piano making their way through some notoriously difficult passage in a concerto or something. After not much more than a minute or two he’d worked it all out and raised his head to give me the details, the estimate, and the date by which it would be finished. I agreed and then asked him for the phone number of a cab company I could call to take me to the car rental place so I could pick up the vehicle I had rented for the meantime.
But no. He insisted that he would drive me across town and so I got in his truck and we headed off. This amounted to a good half hour or more in the middle of his day.
The kicker was yet to come though. A couple of weeks later the car was ready. The work was excellent and the price was exactly what he’d quoted. When we were standing by my newly shiny car he gave me the written service guarantee, said he’d remember me anyway, but then said words that out of the mouth of someone with less integrity and a poorer work ethic would have sounded like a vapid promise—something like, “Your satisfaction with my work is important to me.” He meant it. Frankly, I could have hugged him there on the spot, but it’s likely for the best that I restrained myself, because, well, I don’t think he was that kind of guy.
I’ve had service like that from all sorts of people. My nurse practitioner. Various servers and clerks in restaurants, cafés, and stores. My respiratory technician. The maintenance guy at my condo building. My registered massage therapist. An independent handyman. And on and on.
As I mentioned, and likely it goes without saying, a variation in degrees of service exists in all cities and places. It just seems so extreme here, as if there’s no middle way. You either get excellent service or you get what I’ve heard called, as in the title of this episode, don’t-give-a-fuck’edness. I had a good parallel example with a souvenir wall clock that I’d bought in London, but that wasn’t working any more. I brought it to a repair shop in one of the malls and they gave me a slip of paper as a receipt and said they’d call me back when it was ready. Weeks went by and I’d heard nothing, so I just went back to the shop and asked about it.
“Oh,” she said, “it can’t be repaired,” and then handed it back to me. It’s bad enough that they had apparently come to that conclusion after examining the clock, and then for some reason chose not to tell me about it. But—and I have no way of knowing this for sure—I have the feeling that they had not even touched the clock in the weeks during which I was waiting. And now that I was there in front of her she decided that it was a good time to get this small job off her hands and just lie and give it back to me. I took it and was satisfied that at least I didn’t have to pay some bullshit “processing fee” or something like that.
So I took it to a real clocksmith who happens to have a shop downtown. He examined it while I was there, spoke a bit about the intricacies of the design, consulted a catalogue, and said, yes, he could repair it, but he just needed to order a part. I was still feeling the “don’t give a fuck” from the woman at the mall store, so I hesitated, but then said agreed. I got another receipt, but the exact opposite happened. Just a couple of weeks later, just as he had predicted, I had a call from them that my clock was ready. I went to pick it up. It worked and it is still working on the wall right behind me right now as I speak. Money well spent. A craftsman who took time with a customer. A businessman who delivered on what he promised. What a concept!
I still ponder generally about the reason for the extremes here. Perhaps those who do social science research might say it has to do with the smaller sample size (St. John’s is about a fifth the size of my former home of Ottawa). Perhaps it’s something about the Newfoundland, or the St. John’s, culture. Perhaps it’s that excellent service is the norm, as I said earlier, and so that’s why you notice the horrific service so much. It reminds me a bit of the stereotype many people have about the work ethic of Newfoundlanders. Some people say we’re lazy (there are many jokes about the Newfie construction worker spending all day just leaning on his shovel) and others say that Newfies are among the hardest-working people they have ever met. Anecdotally of course, but I’ve seen that even in my extended family: some of them “work like a jeezler” and some of them are “lazy as a cut dog.”
And that’s all for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. If you like the podcast, please give me a rating on Apple or Spotify. And join me again next Tuesday for a new episode.