Sarah Morgan
I got my oil changed this weekend, and at the end, as always, they warned me that I would get surveyed.
Note: Honda makes wonderful cars. They make wonderful dealerships. They make wonderful service departments. They hire wonderful people. But holy hell, they survey you to death. Every time I see them, they survey me. Then the dealership calls to survey me again. Then Honda of North America calls to survey me. Honda: I have a lot of opinions, but even I do not have enough opinions to make all this surveying worth your while.
Anyway. When I paid, the cashier warned me that I’d be surveyed, and cheerily informed me that “anything less than excellent is failure for us”. And then when the dealership called to check on me, they, too, told me that I’d be getting another call, and again reminded me that “anything less than excellent is failure”.
I’m not yet enough a curmudgeon to take these issues up with people making minimum wage and reading a script, but honestly, this makes me nuts. Anything less than excellent is failure? This is the problem with our country today: we’ve come to believe this, and we’re raising generations of kids who believe it too, and I think it’s garbage.
Because if anything less than excellent is failure, when you try something and are terrible at it, you should give up. And you shouldn’t get praise for working your tail off if it didn’t produce a perfect result. And heaven forbid young impressionable children are allowed to experience anything other than being excellent, because that would obviously be the worst thing in the world.
My oil change was perfectly fine. But I wasn’t fed grapes, and they made me watch the Today show, and I didn’t get a mint left on my dashboard. But I was perfectly satisfied until they started harping about excellence.
Isn’t good enough ever good enough?
ugh…my dad and brother work at a dealership. They hate the survey and feel your pain.
And then my coworker just got off the phone and said it was a survey from Honda about the new car he just bought! The surveys are stalking us!
I know.. I almost cut off my finger while I was doing a Honda survey. But i did tell them that i was dissatisfied once during the survey and I was treated with kid gloves the next time. The Honda people take satisfaction to heart. Unlike Lexus. But that is another story.
As for the kid part, I hope we do better with my daughter’s generation than the kids who just joined the work force. They were told only excellence is acceptable, but they were also told they were excellent at everything. Which has made excellent just mediocre.