We Live to Serve
By Elaine Viets
Helen Hawthorne and I worked in customer
service at a country club for my latest Dead-End Job mystery.
We dealt with every kind of complaint you could imagine –
and a few you couldn’t.
How about the husband who didn’t
want his wife to get a copy of the club bill – because he’d
taken his mistress to lunch there and charged it?
Or the woman who was unhappy
because she’d spilled soft-serve ice cream on her designer
outfit. She wanted the club to pay for her dry cleaning. She
said it was our fault the bowls were “too small.”
We were not permitted to tell
the woman she should have taken a smaller portion. Our jobs
demanded that we treat club members with the utmost courtesy,
no matter how badly they treated us.
This Dead-End Job mystery is
“Clubbed to Death,” and Publishers Weekly was
kind enough to call this a “superior cozy series.”
The Superior Club was also the
name of the novel’s mythical country club.
We watched millionaires shovel
cheap cookies into Prada purses, and folks with six-figure
incomes order sliced lemons and make their own lemonade at
the table with the free water and sugar packets.
We had to learn to tactfully
handle the chronic complainers. Anyone who worked customer
service has a few key phrases they use. In “Clubbed
to Death,” Phil, Helen’s lover, and Margery, her
landlady, outlined them for her after a bad day at the Superior
Club.
“Next time Mrs. Rich screams at you,
tell her, ‘Rest assured that topic will be brought up to the staff,’
” Margery said. “It will, too. You’ll warn them that she’s
a bitch on wheels. But she doesn’t know that. Mrs. Rich is happy because she
thinks she got someone in trouble.”
“Here’s another good one,”
Phil said. “I use it all the time: ‘Don’t you worry, ma’am.
There will be a note in the file on this incident.’ ”
“You’re not lying. The note will warn the
staff that Mrs. Rich is a real problem.”
“If the complainer is halfway reasonable,”
Margery said, “you try this one: ‘I understand. I agree with you. But the
rules say . . .’ ”
“How do you handle the line that always makes me
grit my teeth: ‘I’m a doctor.’ The doctor acts as if he expects the
yacht club basin to part so he can walk across it. I’d like to say, ‘So
what?’ but that would get me fired.”
“No, no, Helen,” Phil said. “You have
to tweak their noses, not hit them on the head with a brick. Next time someone says,
‘I’m a doctor,’ you say, ‘ PhD or MD?’ Deliver it
very seriously. That always flummoxes them.”
Helen laughed, but it was clear she wasn’t finding
the lesson funny. Phil looked at her and said, “You don’t believe a word
of this, do you?”
“I hate this job,” Helen said. “I hate
these pointless people.”
“But you like combat,”
Phil said. “Why do the members upset you so much?”
“I don’t know,”
Helen said, miserably. “I don’t understand them.
I don’t understand myself. I guess I’m not a Superior
person.”
Helen went to work, determined
not to let the job get her down. Her resolution lasted about
ten minutes. What tipped Helen over the edge was the woman
who screamed, “I‘ll have your job.”
“I
hope so,” Helen told her. “You deserve it.”
CLUBBED TO DEATH: A Dead-End Job Mystery, is
$21.95 in hardcover from NAL/Obsidian. The ISBN is 978-0-451-22394-4.
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