With Flying Colors

My God, sometimes I just reflect my true colors all over again, and that really gets my juices flowing. I could have given myself a migraine had I been the travel agent who booked my itinerary over the course of close to four grueling hours yesterday evening.

But Mustafa Bhai at Tahiri Travels, a small but successful agency right behind every head office on I. I Chundrigar road, showed plenty of patience, resilience and commitment to satisfying my every whim.

As usual, I was after eating my cake and having it too – juggling event dates, seasonal fares, airline schedules, and office leaves – till I finally managed a tentative date with a complicated timetable and told him to take my documents home incase I just decide to take my life by storm and fly out that very night.

(Note to self: don’t even consider any airline that’s not Emirates if a broad range of flight options, i.e. precious time and flexibility, is more valuable than x amount more airfare).

A midnight call to tell him tonight’s off didn’t have him bothered him either. No wonder he has a ‘Best Supportive Agency’ on his wall. Mustafa Bhai at Tahiri Travels also certifies my personal Tough Customer Approved rating – which is about as difficult to get these days as a nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Underneath your clothes

Chase up is actually a wonderful store. So is Cambridge, but it’s off my shopping route since they charge more than a 1k for a pajama (that’s actually worth it) and an arguably full price for damaged pieces at their factory outlet in Saddar.

With more branches that are thankfully representative of the new millennium unlike other clothes stores, customer service at Chase up ranges from less than nice to very nice.

But at Rs. 199 for a beautiful shirt that’ll last you at least a few months, I won’t bat an eyelid at the counter guys that can seriously do better. They also get my three star rating for exchanging a shirt that was discovered to be large-size after unpacking, my mistake, without so much as a sneer.

No shoestrings attached

So it’s a common tactic to reel in customers with a half-off sale on items no one wants (except the one to prove some items are nice that’s out of stock). But Urban Sole, and its partnership with Pierre Cardin is my idea of quality shoes that stand out from other offerings in the market. The customer service could be hand and foot, but their shoes are simply worth ignoring the price tags and dropping the grudge for claiming to have sold out your prized sale item that you suspect was a ruse: stylish + practical = bright designs, quality materials, finishing and comfort that just falls short of heavenly.

Ornamented yet Maddening Institute

The fact that no hospital has a gift or flower shop for visitors who’d like to cheer up their patients is the least of concerns. Spotless floors and pretty paintings are good enough for me any day. But with herons in your rock garden and elevator music (a first for Pakistan), you’d expect them to treat their private patients with some dignity at least. That’s why it’s so disappointing when a hospital known for its high standards and on the corporate panel of a number of leading organizations in Karachi so easily frustrates hospital visitors and patients that aren’t really such tough customers at all. For example, the family of a foreign patient from Dubai who just had a tumor removed isn’t being crabby when they scream at a male nurse who barges in to her private room when she’s getting a change of clothes. Or when her family visitors have to get a second opinion – not from a doctor, but from a front desk receptionist, since his colleague insists that she’s left the premises even when the only way that was possible would be through astral projection or other science fiction. Or when they refuse to serve dinner to the patient who’s just been operated and admitted since her family made the mistake of settling dues before dinner time. Or when security is only doing his duty when he becomes an automatic voice response system and keeps repeating ‘no I can’t allow you to wheel the patient out the gate’ into the taxi waiting right outside without even considering if he can make an exception to hospital policy of having the vehicle circle around and come inside. Okay, the last part wasn’t bad policy, though a couple of words vaguely resembling courtesy would have been a little softer. I guess I could have broken into a sob and a string of expletives, if only those damn herons weren’t so magnificent, and the hospital staff hadn’t had such impeccably clean shoes.