Blood-boilers and tearjerkers

So, 'they' asked me to write about my biggest blood-boiler or tearjerker in social-venture-land. That's not easy, friends, not because my blood doesn't boil pretty fast nor that my tears wouldn't be available but that's not what I feel like writing about. I prefer to talk about the little things in life that make all the difference.

Like that smallish blood-boiler with the man at the frequent traveller desk of my airline. When confronted with our complaint that through a directly verifiable mistake the airline had overcharged us by some 500 Euro, the man - without even looking at us - handed us a form to fill in and send to the complaints department. Man, how deep can you sink as a company to create a whole separate department just for complaints! "Hey", we said, "you can check it with one telephone call and reimburse us now". He wouldn't. "OK, then let's go and see that complaints department here and now". Impossible of course: why put the client relations department of an airline on the airport? Very illogical! It won't surprise you that the handling of this complaint took some 10 months and umpteen letters and telephone calls. In fact we had to go as far as a pretty hefty letter to the president of the company to finally bring justice.

So very different to that experience was the extremely warm feeling that one florist gave me when delivering the flowers I had ordered for my mother's funeral. The day before we had discussed at length exactly what I had in mind. The piece he brought was really beautiful; he must have worked on it for several hours and had put all his love into it. However, it turned out that I had obviously misled him about colours. As soon as the florist realised this, he offered to drive back (80 km) and make a new one (it was a Sunday!). I declined, of course, but guess which of the above two enterprises I would put on the candidate list for SVN membership?