Jewish Musings, Thursday, November 2, 2023

[peachymom1]

What’s on your mind — how to make kugel? This week’s Torah reading? Life goals? Prayer? We are all engaged in weight loss/weight maintenance journeys and we are all Jewish or at least interested in Judaism. We like to eat, we like to discuss. It is our goal here to provide each other support on our journeys, to share experiences, to call on our rich cultural heritage and texts, and to help each other grow spiritually.

Some of us take weekly turns starting the thread:

Frieda (hopefully)?
Holly
Lee
Louise
Lynne
Peachy

And for those of you that stop by to read this thread without posting — you are welcome to, but you are also welcome to chime in. Don’t be shy!

[peachymom1]

Good morning! I’d like to share an “orchid” story with you!

Last night, DH, DS32 and I went out for dinner, and I ran into someone I hadn’t seen or talked to since before the pandemic, someone I would not even have recognized if it hadn’t been for an “orchid” letter I wrote about her. This was just too coincidental not to share with you, since we just talked about orchids and onions. If I’ve told you about this lady before, please forgive me. Here’s the story!

One of my job duties is to arrange travel for my team, including candidates who fly in to interview with my team. There are two very nice hotels near our office, about the same distance from it, in opposite directions. We have corporate rates with both of them, and for many years, I could never find a reason to favor one over the other, so I alternated between them whenever a visitor or candidate needed a hotel booked near us.

About six years ago, we were acquired by another company, who had a completely different system for travel arrangements, and it took months before we were fully integrated into their system. In the meantime, whole teams of employees from other departments needed to travel to our location for training and meetings, and since none of us could use the travel system yet, I was given a special corporate credit card that allowed me to charge expenses to cost centers other than my own, and I arranged everyone’s travel. (Normally, company policy is that you can’t use your own corporate card to pay for anyone but yourself, and the expense reporting system doesn’t let you change the cost information to something other than your own.) So for a long time, I was booking flights and hotels for many, many travelers and candidates.

It was easy enough to charge flights to my corporate card, but for hotels, I had to fill out and submit a credit card authorization form for each traveler and fax it to the hotel, along with a photocopy of my credit card and my driver’s license. I found out quickly that of the two hotels near us, Hotel A required the forms for each and every reservation I made there, and then sometimes they failed to check the fax machine, or somebody didn’t mark their records, or some other nonsense would happen, and we’d have problems when the traveler went to check out. I talked to the hotel manager about this, but it kept happening, so one day I walked over there in person and explained to her that since I was providing a ton of business for her hotel, it would be really great if she could make sure things were made easier for me, but to no avail, because the very next day, a front desk clerk couldn’t find my authorization form again, blah-blah-blah.

Hotel B, on the other hand, never made a single mistake with my reservations or authorizations. In fact, the first time I booked a large group of people at that hotel, I got a phone call from a lovely lady, let’s call her X, who asked if it would be more convenient for me to allow her to keep my credit card info on file and just call me to confirm the names of any future travelers. No more credit card authorizations! She added that she could also email me the hotel receipts directly when the travelers departed, so I’d have them right away for my expense report.

What a doll! I sent all my travelers to Hotel B from that moment on, unless someone specifically asked for the other one and was willing to use their own credit card. X was true to her word; I never had a single issue with her hotel, and she would call me from time to time to make sure I was happy with how things were done.

Many months later, when the amount of travel died down, and I was back to just supporting my own department, it occurred to me that I should tell X’s boss how awesome she was. I called her and asked for her boss’s name and the best way to contact them, so I could trill about her. She humbly said that wasn’t necessary, she was just doing her job, but I insisted, so she gave me his name and email address. I wrote the most glowing orchid letter I could, and I got a wonderful response from X’s boss, thanking me for taking the time to tell him how wonderful X was.

I also got an emotional call from X herself, not just to thank me profusely, but to tell me she’d gotten a promotion, a raise and a bonus, all because of her achievement in getting so much of my company’s business for the hotel. Hooray! I was so happy for her! She totally deserved it. She insisted on hosting me for lunch at the hotel, so I met her the next week and had a lovely lunch with her.

That’s the only time we met in person, but she must have an amazing memory, because she recognized me at the restaurant last night. What a delight to see her again! She said she still had her job at the hotel because of me, even through the pandemic, because the hotel considered her to be vital for their business. I told her no, it was because of HER and her excellent service and professionalism, not my doing at all. She said, “There’s enough credit to go around, isn’t there?” We laughed together, and I felt like a million bucks.

Oh, and by the way, I did also write a very professional onion letter to the manager at Hotel A about why I’d taken my business elsewhere. She called and left a beautiful apology on my voicemail. I never called her back or sent anyone else to that hotel. Sorry, Sugarplum, you missed the boat!

I don’t have an actual discussion topic – just wanted to share this with you. Anybody else have any positive news? Run into anyone lately that you’d missed? Anything at all you’d like to share?

[lee058]

Good morning everybody! Hope you are all well and SAFE! Please pray for Israel.

Re today's topic: peachymom1 , You really brightened my day; I'm so glad to hear positive news! I have some positive news myself; I now have a brand-new working toilet!! The plumbers were supposed to arrive at 7:15AM, and were actually a little early (!!). This was fine with my family, as we were all ready. It was still dark out, so I had all the lights on, inside and out, plus the kitchen blinds and front door open for more light. The plumbers got their work done quickly and efficiently, and I am very pleased. I should call their company; thanks for the reminder. They even cleared out my son's sink for free (it had some facial hair in it and wasn't draining completely). The bill was $100 less than the estimate, if you can believe it; $550 instead of $650. I am feeling really good about all this.

We need more positive news, so please share if you can.

Have a peaceful day, Lee

Edit:  I just called the plumbing company, and said lots of nice things about the techs!  The receptionist was very pleased, especially when I said I wanted the guys' supervisor to know what good people they had working for them.

[louise]

Peachy I loved your story - and it's so YOU to actually go over to the hotel(s) etc. Veru nice work all around.

We are all interested in diet stories. I was using Noom and found that the calorie range they gave me each day was too high for me. And it went up all day long as I walked. I asked if this could be adjusted. They have all these AI chats and paradigms and after many tedious exchanges I learned that I could not change it. I find it demoralizing to keep seeing these high numbers knowing i couldn't actually eat them. I spent a month not losing weight. Could I ignore what they were telling me and just go lower? Of course, but it kind of defeats the point of having all this fancy AI software in the app. You pay a year in advance. I wanted a refund. They have a no refund policy. I explained over and over that this is a company that claims to work on psychological principles but were creating a demoralizing experience for me. They were not delivering - it's not that I changed my mind. And so on. In the end I lost and they semt me an evaluation form for the last exchange I had, which was with an actual human. I gave 3 stars but explained that the rep was actually 5 stars and that Noom was 1 star (zero not being an option)!

If it's of interest I can explain further about a major difference between WW and Noom but I think a comment I made on Halloween sums it up: 5 fun size candy bars on Noom would be about a quarter of my calories. On WW it’s my points for the entire day!