10.26.05
Posted in Uncategorized on October 26th, 2005 at 7:14 pm by Dee O'Neil Andrews
by: Dee Andrews
In this age of widespread technology that links people together in seemingly every aspect of their lives with many new ways and links being created every day, I guess I really shouldn’t have been surprised that my latest grace note came into my life by some of those means. And, yet, somehow I was. I suppose it’s because most of the time the “linking” technology seems much more likely to separate us than to connect us, you know.
Although, I suppose, in reality it all started through a totally natural event, hurricane Katrina. At least that was the cog that started the wheels turning in the hearts and minds of individuals far away that led to, and is still leading to, acts of kindness and goodness too numberable to relate here in the “Katrina Zone.” But, more on that in a minute.
The other, even
greater surprise was that the grace note came through channels that one these days normally doesn’t expect or even anticipate any more, sadly enough. And that was the old-fashioned sought after and carefully cultivated “customer service” and caring on the part of large corporations and their employees for all of those vast numbers of people they did business with day in and day out.
I mean, when was the last time
you really expected much help when calling a company or corporation on an 800 number, by trying to find anyone “human” through a website or otherwise online or through a maze of computerized voices and punched in digits on a telephone? Right! Those instances are few and nowadays very far between.
Well, I’m here today to commend a corporation and to highly commend one of its employees, Marilyn (no last names here), along with a “mini” grace note to someone in another corporation, Cindy, who got the wheel turning.
As I say, in a way it started with Katrina , but actually Tom and the
Picayune Item had been doing business with the second corporation,
Gazette Communications, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for a good while, although he had never spoken with anyone there but once, quite briefly. His company in Birmingham handled the transactions with Gazette, which prints the Item’s Sunday Comic sections weekly and sends them down.
It was all strictly business. But after Katrina, Tom and the Picayune Item received a “Care” package in the mail one day from someone unknown to him at Gazette full of Iowa products (mostly food) of various kinds, including a big box of
Hy-Vee specialty crackers, and he brought a few items home for us to eat after we both finally got back home.
The food was delicious, but Tom didn’t know who to thank. So last week I got online to find Gazette’s website, scrolled through several pages about different branches of the large corporation, guessed at the one I thought was the right one and blindly emailed a thank you online to whoever thought up the idea, went shopping to buy the goodies, packed and shipped them and thought enough of the people working at the Item to do something so nice for them.
She promptly emailed me back. Her name is Cindy. I commend her for thinking beyond just a corporate, business relationship between her company in Iowa with a small daily newspaper in south Mississippi and adding a much appreciated personal touch.
My “grace note” goes to a young woman named Marilyn who is Customer Service Coordinator for Hy-Vee Corporation in West Des Moines, Iowa, the company that made the great crackers we liked so much. We wanted more, so I decided to contact Hy-Vee through its website to see if we could order more from here, even though it doesn’t have any grocery stores around here or other outlets (that I could find) for ordering online from here.
Marilyn emailed me back the next morning giving me the name of the person I could contact in West Des Moines for such a special mail-order request and his phone number, which is what I wanted and really appreciated. But then, much more than that, she said that while she mostly telecommutes from Minneapolis to her job in West Des Moines, she was going to headquarters in Iowa in a couple of days and wanted to personally, mind you (not corporation sponsored or paid for), send us a package containing boxes of the crackers as a post-hurricane gift for us since we enjoyed Hy-Vee’s product so much.
I don’t know Marilyn. She doesn’t know me. Or Tom.
I haven’t even talked with her. I just sent an email online to a corporation in Iowa requesting information and she emailed me back from Minnesota with the information I requested and much more. She shared herself and showed me the goodness in her heart with actions to prove it.
I’ll have to say - my faith in God’s goodness and the goodness of individuals in all parts of this country and around the world, in all kinds of settings, in all walks of life - in corporations and businesses and schools and churches and every other place you can think of - grows ever stronger through the years of my life. Especially of late, since Katrina, my spiritual life, and I believe the spiritual lives of many, has been quickened and renewed and refreshed.
I truly believe God wants
all of us to be
His grace notes for good to everyone around us we meet and deal with. And I truly believe we all need to focus on
seeing and
taking advantage of the opportunities to do so. That’s what “Grace Notes” is all about.
[P. S. I guess it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Hy-Vee’s slogan is “A helpful smile in every aisle.” So, as Marilyn wrote me, her “company is dedicated to smiling!”. I don’t know about you, but that works for me!]
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