Contest Winner!

I was lucky enough not only to host an up-and-coming Tulsa blogger on this blog yesterday, but to also gather your tales of retail woe as entries for a Jeff Martin book giveaway.


After skimming parts of this book and reading your comments, I'm going to a meanie-head and say: My experiences in customer service were quite pleasant, actually. I was one of the lucky ones. From the time I was 16 until my senior year of high school, I occupied a not-exactly-ergonomic but still cushy chair at the Mazzio's call center here in Tulsa. After that I worked at the Cherry Street location of Panera Bread. Who could complain about talking on the phone, bagging cookies and mopping out a giant oven all day? I'm sure there were days when I could have, but looking back on those years, Call Center Chick and Bakery Girl were definitely O.K. jobs.

Does that mean I've never had one of those jobs that required me to fetch coffee, pick up dry cleaning, reshelve a wayward book of government maps five times in a day, label serials by hand in a hot, dark, musty, forgotten part of one of Oklahoma's largest libraries, refill the paper of every single printer in said library three times a day, or make copies on an ancient copy machine until my ears rang? No. But those jobs couldn't exactly be categorized under such a pretty term as customer service. They were more like adventures in indentured servitude.

Not that I'm bitter.

And now, the winner of a pristine, undefiled copy of Jeff Martin's "The Customer is Always Wrong: The Retail Chronicles!"





Congrats, Amanda! Not only are you my best friend and my son's fairy godmother, but you are the winner of this book! I told you putting up with me would pay off. Now, never enter a contest on this blog again, because when you win, I look like I'm playing favorites, and my readers might retaliate by staging a mutiny.

Yeah. A grizzly mutiny by the other three of my readers besides you who read books. I bet they'd even dress up as pirates. Me timbers, they shiver.