Someone is ONE! And a Good Customer Service Story!

Here she is, examining every molecule of her birthday cupcake. This child has never had a sugary baked anything, and she was not quite sure what to make of it.



She ate it with a sort of silent reverence, looking at each crumb carefully. She had no idea food like this existed, and she had to contemplate it a bit.



But she approved. And I watched her with her first bite of cake and thought how First Babies always get this treatment - the second will get a bit of cupcake at 10 months because the older sibling is eating one, and it's just not FAIR!!

She didn't just get a lousy cupcake after dinner. Her real party will be Sunday afternoon, and there will be a mob scene and presents and crazy fun.

I had a really crappy customer service experience this week, but I'm not going to tell it, because I will just relive the pissed-offed-ness, and I don't want to revisit my rage. Instead, I'll tell the tale of the death rattle of my fancy-pants Keurig coffee maker.

I bought it last fall, after visiting Cousin C a couple of times and using hers, and absolutely loving the convenience and variety and efficiency of the one cup at a time method of caffeine delivery. Target helpfully put the model I bought on sale at a really great price, and I enjoyed it very much. It moved in the car with me in November - that's how attached I am to this machine. It's like a pet that can make coffee.

So it was distressing when on Tuesday morning I made my first cup of coffee with no problem...but then on the second cup, pushed the button - water filled the cup about a third of the way, and...stopped. WTF? It's 6:30 in the morning, and I don't have enough caffeine in my system to comprehend this catastrophe! Thankfully, I was able to produce a full cup of coffee by hitting the button three times, and it tasted okay.

So I went online and read through all the troubleshooting and warranty information, and tried the troubleshooting steps without success. I then dreaded the warranty issue - the website said something about returning the machine for servicing. Oh crap. Please, no.

I called the company. Very, very nice customer service people expressed truly touching sympathy that their machine had let me down. Warranty gal ran though a couple of other things to try, no luck. I waited for instructions to send the machine back to them for repair. Instead, she said, "Okay, I'm shipping you a new machine. You can throw that one away. Send back the K-cup holder as proof of the exchange." That was Tuesday afternoon, and the FedEx truck pulled up today. The new machine is sitting on my kitchen counter, ready to provide me with an after dinner cup of decaf. I've set it up and ran water through it, and noticed immediately that this machine is QUIETER than the other one was. I'm now thinking the old one had something wrong with it all along, and just took six months to prove it.

So anyway, while its easy to find a lot of gruesome stories of bad customer service, a good experience should be shared too. (BTW, this good experience was facilitated by the fact that I had registered my machine when I bought it - should you buy one, don't skip that step. Besides, the coffee selection on their website is insanely wonderful.)

Think a good thought for the Murphinator tomorrow, Internets. He's getting his teeth cleaned and fixed (he may lose a few). He has developed an infection along the gumline, and his blood work revealed an elevated WBC, so it looks like he has a systemic infection. While I tried to put off the dog's dental work - it's a financial drain in a time of nothing BUT financial drain - I really can't anymore without compromising his overall health, and he has enough to deal with. Let's hope fixing the toofies will improve his overall condition.