The Hearing Problem

Familiarity is suppose to breed comtempt. For me familiarity breeds hearing problems!!!

Weekends are always so damn exciting for me. You get multiple requests coming together at any one second, and you just wish you had 8 pairs of hands and legs and a Pentium 8 CPU in the head and 3 mouths (sorry, the story of 3 mouths and a head dated May 12, 2004 has been deleted by the Association of Fast Talkers). Sometimes you get 5 parents at the desk asking for info on the classes at the same time, one student asking for papers to be zapped, another student wanting to go to the washroom but couldn't open the door, the Xerox gets jammed, another parent wants to hand a jacket to a child in the classroom and then the phone rings ...

" Hello, is this Victoria Tutorial? This is Lee here .."

" Kuan Yew? "

" No lah .., are you trying to be funny??? Anyway can you please tell my son to wait for me at the carpark, I will be there to pick him up later."

" Sorry sir, but Hsien Loong just went down to McDonalds to get himself a Happy Meal .. "


Fellow jurors, can you teach me how to take care of this man's request?? First of all, I don't know who this Lee guy is and who the hell the son is and secondly, which level and which subject he is doing and which time-slot the son is at ! But strange enough, you get requests like this all the time. I had my team of scientists (not the ones from Inner Bangalore) to analyse this situation and they have unanimously pointed out to this phenomenon call ... familiarity.

They all assume that because they have talked to you, pay you fees, laugh and cry with you, cursed and screamed at you, that you automatically register their faces and their voices, together with the 20000 other voices of parents and students into your little brain. If I could do that all the time I would be featured on Discovery Channel documentaries.

Sometimes you think you really can recognise the parent's voice, but then again you cannot exactly tell who the child is. That's the time when I will be scrambling to look at the caller ID and then trying to match that number with anyone on the database. It also helps when they tell you their child's name is Michelle or Natalie. I scrolled down the list of Michelles and Natalies and there are least 10 of them.There are currently four Lee Xin Yi(s)in the centre and there are four different Crystals. There is Crystal, Christal, Kristal and Cristel. Somehow you just feel parents here have run out of names to give their new-borns that they just invent names of their own but they still want their child to be named after their great-grandmother's cousin's neighbour.

And I feel it's too rude to try and ask the caller who she is because she thinks after a few months with the centre, you should know by now her voice, face, children, tuition time, husband's name, handphone number, office number, fax number, car plate number, preferred place of parking, her maid's name, her maid's secret lover, her children's water bottle colour, bus number to her house, favourite mode of payment, favourite bank and favourite jeans.

To solve this problem, I have decided to enrol myself with the special hearing division of the CIA in United States. I hear that these people actually train ordinally folks like me to have super hearing power, as good as Spiderman's and it comes with 30 Day Money Back guarantee. Those CIA guys you see in the movies, always in the black suits and the hearing aids, those are the trainees. Tell you when I graduate I will be able to hear feathers collide and cotton wool flying. That way when that Lee calls, I will be able to tell exactly who he is and what he wants and whether he is the father or the mother! (ref: 7 May 2004)

This is the essence of customer service.