A Bowl of Cherries

It's a blog for heavens sake. How can one have writers' block (or is it writer's block?). The strange thing is that I have so many notes about blogs to be written that it's almost a daunting task just reading through them all. Anyway after a very busy two weeks where reading posts took precedence over writing one I'm on the ferry travelling south with no excuse to get up and do something else.

You know how the saying goes - people don’t remember what you say or do, but how you make them feel.

So why do organisations not realise that their reception staff are such an important part of their organisation and that their interface with the public should receive far more attention than it obviously does. I say this because I sometimes think that the criteria adopted these days is to find a person who can 'protect' the organisation from its customers, patients or clients rather than facilitate the interaction.

I am by nature a happy, positive person and I approach reception staff with that attitude. I went to medical practice recently where the reception staff are invariably very busy with phone calls and patients waiting to speak to them but are, in my experience, always pleasant and helpful. However on this occasion there was a fairly new member of staff who looked up from the telephone call she had just taken and with a broad and genuine smile dealt with my requests. It made my day.

I then had a hospital appointment and again received a cheerful welcome and some banter with the reception staff and nurses and was out from the (again very cheerful) consultant 5 minutes before my appointment was due.

To complete my medical trilogy I went across the car park to the dental practice where one of the staff was completely the opposite. It's true that what she had to tell me didn't exactly please me but it was the dismissive and rude way she dealt with me that irked. She denied vehemently that she had been rude so I will reduce the charge to cheeky with scant regard for the fact that she was speaking to someone over three times her age.

Basically it turned my day from being perfect (and it was still only 0945) to being decidedly imperfect.

So I decided to treat myself to a bacon roll at the Woodlands. There I was met by another happy smile and was asked if I wanted my 'usual large black".  I retired to my crossword with the feeling that a modicum of well-being was restored.

Have a nice day. Or as someone in the US apparently now says "Have the day you deserve". Ah. Perhaps that was the problem.

As Ethel Merman and then Rudy Vallee sang (and Lew Brown wrote back in 1931)

People are queer, they're always crowing, scrambling and rushing about; 

Why don't they stop someday, address themselves this way? 

Why are we here? Where are we going? It's time that we found out. 

We're not here to stay; we're on a short holiday. 

Life is just a bowl of cherries. 

Don't take it serious; life's so mysterious. 

You work, you save, you worry so, 

But you can't take your dough when you go, go, go. 

So keep repeating it's the berries, 

The strongest oak must fall, 

The sweet things in life, to you were just loaned 

So how can you lose what you've never owned? 

Life is just a bowl of cherries, 

So live and laugh at it all.