REMEMBER the days when, if something went wrong with a product you ordered, you picked up the phone and there was a live person on the other end? Wait, there is more. You asked for customer service and were transferred  to another human! And that person perhaps even solved your problem.

I get a warm feeling when I think about that, like fondly remembering an old teacher. We have become so used to the impersonal and baffling labyrinth of automated voice systems at just about every company  and then poor customer service when we do reach an actual person  that we just grudgingly accept it.

We all have bad service stories and love telling them and they do not always involve giant corporations. One of my favorites is about the dry cleaner who returned two of my husband’s shirts with neatly torn holes in each right sleeve. Clearly, they had gotten caught on a machine.

He showed the clerk the holes and asked for replacement shirts. But she insisted that he must be rubbing his elbows so hard on his desk that the shirts wore through. Never mind that we had been going there for years with no such problem. Never mind that they were symmetrical tears.