07 July 2006
After a week apart my chair and I have been emotionally reunited. My emotion was happiness, because I won't have to keep using the uncomfortable chair we reserve for guests. My chair's emotion (I'm guessing slightly here) was dread and disappointment, because I am both overweight and a fidget... which I guess is a pretty bad deal if you happen to be a chair.My chair tends to be under a fair degree of stress, and a week ago it cracked, literally*.
Which brings me to Haywood Office Services, the company (just down the road from us) to whom I took it to be fixed. Over the past few years we've bought cupboards, shelves and filing cabinets from these guys, and spent a reasonable if not stratospheric amount of money. They've seen me enough to know my face, if not my name.
I dragged the chair into their showroom and explained the problem to the nice people behind the desk. The guy heroically kept a straight face while expressing surprise that I could have broken that particular part. Apparently it almost never breaks, and is only made by mystical east-european elves during a full-moon. It will take a couple of weeks to get the part he tells me.
Today, a week later as it turned out, they called me to say that the chair is fixed, and there is no charge. That's a line that I use a lot with clients... "there will be no charge".
I use it because for some jobs the value of investing in the relationship is worth more than a few pounds here or there. Haywood evidently understand this as well, and it will work out for them. As long as we are around to buy office furniture, and they are around to sell it... we'll always go to them first. They spent a few pounds to fix my chair this morning, but bought a lot of loyalty.
*This also happened to my previous chair 5-6 years ago... it was only fixed with a welding iron. My working assumption is that I am unlucky, and just keep choosing really weak chairs.
Posted by Nick Warren at 1:26 PM
