These are the ramblings of a young married couple in the great City of Chicago.
Did everyone have a good Thanksgiving? Did you give thanks for the good and the bad?
Our special little blessing did not come yesterday, as I was predicting. We have turned to reverse psychology on Jonah. We are telling him about how wonderful it will be for him to not come out. This is a wide departure to our previous plan of coaxing him out with sweet talk.
Stephen Dubner asks “Do Restaurants Blacklist Low-Spending Customers?” He is focused on high-end places, but if you ask my mom you will know that she is on the shit-list of every buisness out there, especially restaurants.
Ever wanted to know what the kitchen of your favorite resturaunt looks like? Ask my mom out for dinner and you will be seated as close as possible.
Ever wanted to know what it is like to fill your own glasses? Take Vicky out for a meal and she will also serve the tea, because the waitress will not.
Want to be the first to have their order taken in a resturant? I cannot gaurantee you will be first, but if my mom is at a nearby table, the odds of your order being taken before hers goes up dramaticlly.
You think I am joking? Not on my mother’s life! Ask her about the flowers to my Grandma Tomaw’s funeral sometime for a non-restaurant experience.
After weeks of wondering and speculation, we learned the sex of our growing unborn child. It is a great relief to not have to refer to him as it. I would be just as happy to know that he were a she. We have pictures from the ultra-sound to be posted and I know Joscelynn with have more motherly things to saw.
The birth of all the children GOD blesses us with will be met with great fanfare. However now, it is with great pleasure I announce…
In late November, Jonah Jacob will be born the eldest son of Jacob Daniel the eldest son of Daniel Earl the eldest son of Deward Earl Tomaw! The next Tomaw generation comes! His arrival will be grand and heralded throughout the land.
Originally uploaded by flatiron32
Proof that Jacob has become a fitness fiend while I am sitting on my arse getting fatter by the day. Yesterday Jacob ran/walked the 3.5 mile JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge. Doesn’t he look sporty and sleek in his race shirt? Also, please implore Jacob to post something so that it does not appear that I have hijacked his site!
I am ordering today’s posts in terms of chronology and not importance, so number two today is my now public pregnancy.
As Jacob has mentioned, I am due shortly after Thanksgiving, which makes me three months pregnant this week. In two weeks I will proudly be able to say I am in my second trimester. I can already tell that the second trimester is much better than the first. I have recently outgrown most of my pants, but on the upside my nausea has subsided and I can now have a good workout at the gym without having to nap for three hours later in the afternoon.
We have seen pictures of the baby and we have heard its heart beat. I have always thought that women are overly sentimental about their babies’ vitals in early pregnancy, but now I realize how shockingly real the whole thing becomes. This is a person in my body that will, God willing, grow up and have a job and a family of its own.
As I consider the life I desire for my children, I find that my concerns run counter to those that I am told I should have. My biggest fears are not that my child will die in a car accident because his or her car seat is turned the wrong way, not that he or she will ingest hormone laced beef, not that TV and computers will tarnish his innocence or reduce her attention span. I am sincerely most worried that my child will face an homogenized, dumbed-down world that is uninteresting and unchallenging. I hope my fears are irrational.
Nothing sticks in my craw like bad customer service.
I recently completed a grueling internship experience that amounted to something of a finance boot camp. My supervisors for this internship had expectations that far exceeded those of any supervisor or professor I have ever encountered, and I certainly fell short many times. The bottom line is, I believe that when you have a job, you should care about doing it well, and when you mess up, you should apologize, learn from your mistakes and do the best you can to rectify the situation.
Domicile Furniture, on October 24th, 2006, promised us a custom upholstered sofa in 8 to 10 weeks. When our sofa arrived in the store five months later, they offered us, approximately, a 10% refund; I told them that I did not feel this was sufficient remuneration. After much arm-twisting, Domicile agreed to a 20% refund.
Oh, how I wish I had told you the last of it. The sofa was delivered to our home and did not fit through our downstairs hallway. Our only choice was to have it shipped back to Domicile. Was this an inconvenience to Domicile? Yes, I will admit that, for a matter of days, it was. I called Domicile to see if we could get a refund, and they told me that my options were to receive full store credit for another sofa or a refund of all but $250! $250 just for them to ship the sofa back to the store and re-sell it, I’m certain, at full mark-up. I explained to the store manager that, had the sofa been delivered in a timely manner, this $250 fee would apply, but we had been inconvenienced for six months and never received the 20% compensation. The manager replied to me that he understood and that’s why he offered the full store credit. Ha! As if he did not know that this was a zero value alternative for me? I told him that I have no intention of ever doing business with Domicile ever again and, like a snot-nosed little know-it-all, he replied, “Just a tip, ma’am, when you’re trying to work something out with someone, you shouldn’t tell them that you never want to do business with them again.†In shock at the nerve of this snake oil salesman, I told him that I was not trying to haggle for a deal, if I had been interested in that, I would have done so when I initially purchased the sofa. Rather, his store failed to deliver on the terms of its contract and for six months I lost the opportunity to either purchase a new sofa or, at the very least, collect interest on the money I had tied up in a sofa with Domicile. I seriously needed to explain to the man that I deserved compensation for the time I wasted trying to do business with his store!
So he sighed and said, “Fine, just pay the $95 delivery fee and we’ll wash our hands of it.†Now, I really think I should have told him to go ahead and deduct the $95 from the 20% refund that they were going to give me at first, but I was starting to feel like a cartoon version of myself, steam pouring out of my ears. I am a stubborn Swede; “letting things go†is really not my strong suit. I guess I paid a $95 “get Domicile off my back†fee. In the end, we got 90% of our money back and immediately ordered a new sofa and chair from another store, which was delivered in a matter of weeks.
Why do I consistently feel as though I need to explain customer service to people? Doesn’t anybody have standards anymore? Why should I ever feel as though I have made an unreasonable demand by asking a person to do his job? I can certainly sympathize with people when they make mistakes so long as they approach the problem with an air of humility and accountability. Just fess up and make it right, for crying out loud! It’s human decency!
I certainly would have been fired from my internship for the kind of attitude I experienced at Domicile.
I am a highly self-conscious communicator, so please be kind. However, there have been recent developments in the Tomaw family that seem to merit some comment from Wifey.
Joscelynn and I are going to see my sister, Dana, and here husband, Kris, this weekend. We were booked to fly out of ORD tonight after work. All week I have been tracking the threat of blizzard in Minnesota, and the threat has come. Our flight was canceled and we have been re-booked on a flight tomorrow afternoon. This is not going to cut into our visit time too much, but I am going to be disappointed if the weather does not subside tomorrow and we have to cancel.
Joscelynn is rather disapointed though. She now does not have an excust to tell her demanding boss when he has her stay late to print the internet or take a certification test for him.
Today, I finalized plans to visit my sister and brother-in-law in Minnesota in the beginning of March. Did a little work, I had forgotten to write the test cases for a bug I fixed. At the end of the day my mom called and told me my grandpa had a stroke today.
He is doing fine and should not have any residual effects. As was also the case after his heart attack last month, he amazes doctors with his abilities to recover from stuff that kills other people. When he was first brought in he had some reduced muscle control in one side, but by the end of the day he was fine. Fine enough that he is scheduled to be released tomorrow. Keep old Herold/Slim/Tubby/Grandpa Miller in your prayers. He is like an old Timex and I want to keep him that way.
