I think of you as my customers, and to use one of the more hilarious phrases I’ve heard at work lately, I’m always striving to “continue to create customer delight.”
(That particular phrase, to a short-timer like me, inspires a combination of uncontrollable twitching and an urge to ram my face through my monitor.)
How do I create customer delight? Think about that word for a second. “Delight.” This is not run-of-the-mill happiness…no, this is “extreme satisfaction.” EXTREME. SATISFACTION. Are you eXXXXTREmely satisfied with your product today, sir or ma’am?!?!?! If not I will add more caffeine and free call waiting and a complimentary car wash! Surely you will be delighted then, right? RIGHT?
How many times in your life are you delighted? By, oh let me throw out something wild here…a phone company? Your dentist? Yourself? Your dog?
How do I maximize stickiness? How do I reduce churn?
I’m falling into a marketing cesspool. A nightmare of resi-busi penetration plans. The only thing I know to do is put in the extra hours…to try 110% to make Trivia Day fun and exciting and DELIGHTFUL. Full. Of. Delight. Deeeeeeeelight. Mmmmmmm. That is so delightful!
So I think it will be fun and exciting and sticky and delightful for you to help me re-purpose some words this week. Pick a word that has a well-known, accepted meaning, and assign the word to something else.
For example: waterboarding.
I’m starting a campaign to change how we feel about the word “waterboard.” Or the activity of “waterboarding.” Don’t we all need some positivity in our lives? A paradigm shift? Wouldn’t it help us if we started maximizing our potential and thinking outside of the box and working synergistically toward exploring and expanding new horizons?
Wouldn’t that be a big win?
Do I have your buy-in on this? Are you on board with me?
Are we on the same page? The same team? The same wavelength?
I bought a “boogie board” (or “body board”) last weekend and I think those are stupid names. It’s a board, you put it in the water, and that’s that. So it’s a waterboard, and when I go to the beach I shall be waterboarding. I don’t see anything wrong with waterboarding, and you can quote me on that.
“Hey, Alex, what are you up to this fine Saturday?”
“Why, howdy Chet! I’m going to the beach with my friend Clem and we’re going to do some waterboarding!”
“That sounds great!”
And it does sound great. So let’s make “boogie boarding” what “waterboarding” used to be, and “waterboarding” what “boogie boarding” used to be. It’s perfect.
CIA: evil boogie boarders.
Me: delighted waterboarder.
Everybody wins.
Today’s question: Pick a word or words and re-purpose them. Special honors go to anyone tackling “delight.” The best re-purposing will gain you one shiny Trivia Point.
I hope you all have an extremely satisfying weekend.
P.S. — Know what creates Alex delight? The strawberry-rhubarb pie that I’m eating for breakfast.
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Delight- the process of making an overzealous skinny person feel fat.
i.e. One time I was at my friend’s sister in law’s house and she was going on and on about how she got her coat at the ‘baby gap’. She was like ‘yeah so I just can’t fit into the regular gap clothes they just swallow me up. I’m so tiny that I can’t ever find anything to fit unless I go to the baby gap. I got this jacket and this hat at the baby gap because things at the baby gap just seem to fit better.’ And to that I said… well actually I said nothing. I just heard about the ‘baby gap’ 300 times that weekend, but you know I was a guest so I was nice. I should have said, ‘Actually those clothes look kind of tight and rediculous on you… you look like a awkward adolescent that hasn’t been shopping for proper fitting clothes in a few years.’ Under the new definition I would be classified as ‘delighting’ her.
Here is the word used in a sentence. ‘To the cheerleader’s horror, the doctor delighted her when he told her she did, indeed, weigh enough to donate blood.’
More examples:
Pointing out that you can see celulite on the back of a thirty four year old woman’s legs when she is wearing hotpants can be delightful.
Woman to a man:
After his 14 mile run, his wife delighted him by telling him he needed to buy some running shorts in a bigger size.
I love me some strawberry rhubarb.
I am sorry. But I like the word delight. The original definition. Not the crazy rude definition defined above. I think delight is a happy word. And even if I don’t get trivia day points I stand behind my opinion that it is a good word and should be used often. Today I am delighted that trivia has returned. And I am delighted to enter what I consider to the the most awful word in the English language–periwinkle. The word itself is not terrible. It is the color associated with the word. What a terrible grey blue color. But I like the word twinkle and I think that periwinkle should be redefined to be a fantastic twinkle. So when you are sitting at a resturant and the twinkle lights come on right at dusk and everything is perfect–it is a periwinkle moment. Or when the stars are out bright at night and everything is really pretty. That is another periwinkle moment. How delightful it is to redefine what I originally thought was a terrible word.
I like these so far.
I like the idea of “delight” meaning, in effect, removing the light from someone. Making them feel bad. That’s a fine application of re-purposing. I have delighted you, have I? Well that’s excellent!
I also think turning periwinkle into something twinkly is good, if it will make the word “twinkly” obsolete. Because I hate twinkling things…but if they are periwinkling that sounds a lot better.
Now I’m confusing myself. Back to pie!
I would like to repurpose Organize.
Organize: The flip-flop feeling of internal organs that occurs when seeing someone you really, really like.
In use — “He may not be able to get ready on time, but I sure do get all organized when I look at those dreamy eyes.”
Or “that poor boy can’t handle the organization he feels whenever the womens’ tennis team walks into the gym.”
And even “I think we should start seeing other people, I just can’t get organized around you anymore.”
The only way he could think to combat his organization around her was to delight her by telling her to lose some weight.
(Alex is very slick not to let us comment on the last page.)
So where do I begin. Thank you. I will miss this blog terribly. This has become a place to get away during the day. This has been a place to go when you want to know your friends are out there struggling through their work day (and the daily challenges of being alive) with you. Those times when it feels like everyone is against you, and you need an escape into a place where you know you are supported and comforted by people you know; you could come here.
So I’m sitting here on a very gray overcast Monday morning feeling like this is going to leave a space somewhere in my mind and heart that can’t be filled. At the same time though, I do realize that this is and has been the Golden Time of Moodytunes. Isn’t it much better to burn out than fade away (thanks Def Leppard)? I would have never felt as strongly as I do if Alex and the rest of us slowly lost touch with Moodytunes due to infrequent posts because of the hassles, successes, and work of the graduate program. It has been an honor just to read everyone’s thoughts and share a closeness and feeling of community. It has also been great watching Alex through the process of taking his writing career farther. It truly takes a brave person to leave the comfort and complacence of the known world and that guaranteed paycheck, and follow the path that you’ve dreamed about. Also know this: If your main goal as a writer is to have your writing affect your reader’s lives and emotions, you are already a success. Anything you do from here on out is just icing on the cake.
I’m sure there are a lot of readers right now laughing to themselves and thinking, ‘That’s a silly statement. How has this little blog changed people’s lives?’ (Actually Alex is probably laughing hardest at that ‘life changing’ statement.) Before you laugh to hard though, answer some questions. For you frequent readers, did you ever find yourself doing something totally out of the ordinary or out of character (such as creating artwork, or reading poems, or thinking about your own prejudices, or hearing new music, or writing stories) that you wouldn’t have been thinking about or doing if you hadn’t read Moodytunes that day. Some days, Moodytunes opened a door to a part of my brain that I seldom get to use at work, and it was just a relief and release to feel that door open and those thoughts and actions to overflow from there. So like I said everything else is just icing on the cake.
So it is still very gray and overcast on a Monday morning, and I guess I feel a little better now that I got that out, but still in between patients I get this little feeling of emptiness that I won’t get to check Moodytunes tomorrow. Lucky for me I can go back to the beginning (before I knew about the blog) and read some old ones I’ve missed.
So I never met my dad’s parents because they both died shortly after I was born. My dad is pretty quiet and keeps to himself. One of the few things I know about my dad’s parents is that they LOVED the Peanuts comics. For this reason, I grew up loving Snoopy and the Peanuts gang. I read about Snoopy all through my childhood and adult hood. When Charles Schultz died I lost it. I was very sad to say the least. The magical thing about Snoopy and Charlie Brown’s thoughts and ideas are that they made sense when I was little and they just have grown up with me to make even more sense when I read them again. I think some of our posts will be just like that. We’ll read them again in a few years and laugh or be comforted just like we had read them for the first time. So for me at least it was perfectly fitting to end with Snoopy……
“Why can’t we get all the people together in the world that we really like and then just stay together? I guess that wouldn’t work. Someone would leave. Someone always leaves. Then we would have to say good-bye. I hate good-byes. I know what I need. I need more hellos.”
Thanks Alex!!! Good luck you’ll do great.
Your friend
John-Michael