She flagged me down from the side of the road.

It was early morning on a stretch of road that is rarely traveled on foot because there is no sidewalk. Sometimes people don’t have a choice. They walk because their car is in the shop or they simply can’t afford one. There are buses, but the schedules are intermittent.

I pulled over.

She was a teenager who appeared nervous as she looked through my open passenger side window. Before she could speak, an angry driver leaned on his horn and looked to be cursing as he swung his jeep around the fraction of my car that was still in the road.

I looked back at her and shrugged.

She thought that she was lost until I turned and pointed to the development that she was looking for. Sheepishly, she asked if she could make a call with my cell phone that I had placed on the seat.

“Sure.”

As she spoke with her cousin, a van pulled up alongside. The driver asked if we needed any help. I thanked him and said that she was just using my phone. He looked hard at me for a moment, then turned to her and waited for a confirming nod, before driving away.

She returned the phone, thanked me, and began to walk up the hill to meet her cousin who was now on the way.

As I continued my commute, I considered the stark difference between the two men with whom I had had those brief encounters.

The first seemed concerned only with getting to where he was going. The girl on the side of the road and I were nothing more than obstructions to him. He was inconvenienced – if one can classify the effort that it takes to make a quarter turn of the steering wheel an inconvenience – and he was upset about it.

The second driver witnessed an adult male and a young girl in an unusual place and decided to take a moment of his time to do something about it.

Maybe he was simply checking to see if we had car trouble.

Maybe he was suspicious of the scene.

The reason doesn’t really matter. What matters is that he stopped to assess the situation, and presumably, to help if he could.

As the father of daughters I am always worried about them. We cannot be with our children all of the time and we never know if or when they will find themselves in adverse situations.

Some people make an effort to help others.

Some people don’t.

To those that don’t I ask, “Do you know where your children are?”

My Mom was a yeller.

With the births of five sons preceding the delivery of the long hoped for daughter, she had a lot to yell about. It couldn’t have been easy raising five boys, although as a group we were relatively well behaved. But still, we were boys.

With no adult male role model in the home, we relied on Mom to teach us how to be men. It was a daunting task for her to be sure.

These were the days before a rap across the back of the legs with a belt or an ear pull were grounds for a visit from family services. As boys, we all pushed boundaries. Often the lines were boldly redrawn in very loud and unmistakable terms.

She was in charge.

Mom pushed us hard to do well in school because she knew that it was important. She also knew that there were other things that we had to learn. A childhood of living below the poverty line taught me lessons that could not be taught in a classroom setting. The streets of Bed Sty, the Lower East Side, and the South Bronx in the 60’s and 70’s were not places for the weak willed or the ignorant. If we weren’t careful, we knew that life could take a horrific turn in an instant. Tenement fires, idle youth in the streets, drugs, gangs, and crime were just some of the obstacles before us.

Mom stressed the importance of sticking together. She wanted to make sure that anyone who had a mind to mess with one of us was assured that they would have to beat down all five of her sons to get to the one. It worked in that this tact prevented more fights than it allowed.

We were lucky.

She’s mellowed some over the years, but she can still boom her voice over the noisiest clatter in a room to get our attention.

Mom succeeded in seeing us all safely into adulthood. This is a feat that required untold hours of work and a diversity of skills to accomplish, yet there’s really no place for this kind of achievement on a resume.

There’s something wrong with that.

Three days ago, I posted a video on YouTube about my experience with Pennsylvania American Water. At issue was a simple billing error that was exacerbated by the less than helpful response that I received when I placed a call to their customer service. I suppose that I should have been grateful that they answered the phone on a Saturday, but that was as good as it got on that day.

This is a story that just about everyone can tell because we’ve all experienced the frustration of feeling that our concerns were being dismissed. Customer service representatives often have scripts that they follow, which in theory, are supposed to quickly address the most common problems of callers.

But what happens when your problem causes the representative to diverge from the script?

Ah, there’s the rub.

I recorded this video after my problem had been resolved. It was just one of my regular vlog posts, with only 60 views as of this writing, but it seems to have reached the eyes of decision makers at the company.

Take a look.

This morning, I received an anonymous Email, ostensibly from a Pennsylvania American Water employee. Because it was sent to me and not simply commented on my video, I don’t feel comfortable quoting from the text, but I will say that it was a very nice Email that contained some very interesting information.

To the anonymous sender: I thank you for taking the time to send me that Email.

In summary, I was thanked for not lodging a complaint, and I was informed that upper management at the company had taken notice of my video. Also, employees are being coached on using common sense and logic when taking calls as a result. Finally, I was also assured that most employees at the company do actually care and want to help their customers to the best of their abilities.

You know what? I believe him or her.

Most people that I know do take their jobs seriously, and since we all have bad days, I know that people are not always at their best. I was frustrated with my situation at the time, but I didn’t want to cause a big stink or get anyone in trouble when I made this video. However, I am delighted that the video has apparently been well received and that the folks at Pennsylvania American Water are making an effort to improve their customer service, so that the next person in my situation can be spared some needless frustration.

Bravo.

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Have you had a customer service experience that went from wrong to right?  Tell me about it in the comments.

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