A Simple Thank You

I get quite a few of my retail customers as referrals from many different sources. I have folks who work in service departments and parts departments of various car dealerships all over town. They give my name and phone number out when a locksmith is needed. Hopefully it’s because they know that I will do my level best to satisfy their customer’s locksmith need, based on the quality of work I have done in the past. There is another reason why they remember my name; I make sure to say, “Thank you for the referral”.

Saying, “Thank you”, doesn’t cost me anything. It does require a conscious effort on my part to remember that these calls could just as easily been given to some other locksmith. Every once in a while I will take them a berry or apple pie that Lucy has set aside, or take them a half gallon of Blue Bell Ice Cream as a way of putting an exclamation mark on the meaning of “Thank You”. I know who likes blue berry pie, Oreo cookies, chocolate ice cream and make it a point to drop off that confectionary delight when the time is right. During Baseball season I will often hand out some tickets to an Astros game; mind you, these will be in the “nose bleed” section; I’m not rich. The interesting thing is that none of these people expect these extra tokens of appreciation; they would have done the same thing without them.

That brings me to my “tip of the hat” to Mover Mike who has been teaching me how to use the trackback function. It took a while longer than it took to teach the cows how to use the VCR functions to record in the movie, “City Slickers”. Then Mover Mike gave me an introductory lesson on HTML commands, “Geek talk”. Some of the tool icons in Blogger don’t always function, the one that I get frustrated at the most lets you hide a URL within the text of your blog; that is when it works. I just wanted to say, “Thanks Mike”, formally so that the rest of the blogging community would know who to blame when I hide URL’s and link to them or place a trackback under a blog.