Mr. Mawby You've Been On My Mind

This column originally appeared on July 18, 2010

Tredyffrin has been on my mind of late, and with Tredyffrin, Cincinnati.

Allow me to explain.

Some thirty years ago this month I was getting ready to pack up my 1971 Dodge Dart with almost every possession I had acquired to date and drive over the Allegheny mountains to Chester County, where friends from college offered a worldly paradise and the possibility of gainful employment in the news business.

I had been living the past year in Union County, Ky., in a town called Sturgis. If you Google Sturgis now, you will get a lot of websites that deal with motorcycles, but few that deal with the pork and coal capital of western Kentucky. Sturgis is where I got my start in the news dodge, and it prepared me for a lot of odd details of government life that have served me well.

First, the paper required me to refer to the town mayor as “Dr.” So-and-so, even though the man was not an actual holder of a medical doctor’s license but rather a chiropractor. Second, the mayor’s brother was a county judge, but not a judge in the legal sense. County judges are more like Kentucky’s version of our county commissioners. It escapes me what they called their Common Pleas court judges; they might have been magistrates or justices for all I can recall. Lastly, the mayor’s brother’s first name was Durwood, and he raised pigs. I have never met another person named Durwood, and I have never forgotten the smell of his farm on a hot July afternoon.

I digress.

After moving to Pennsylvania and finding an apartment in Devon at the old Sugartown Mews apartment complex (where the roaches checked in and never checked out), I hooked on at the Suburban and Wayne Times, a venerable weekly newspaper whose editor made friends with his readers by showing no sympathy at the death of John Lennon. The managing editor who hired me sent me to Tredyffrin, a township on the Upper Main Line outside Philadelphia, to cover the Board of Supervisors on the basis that I knew what the difference was between a “zoning variance” and a “special exception.” I have since forgotten what that difference is, and would not like to be reminded, thank you very much.

Tredyffrin was a change from covering the city council in Sturgis, primarily because of the nature of the people who lived there -- preppy lawyers rather than coal miners -- and the place that it found itself demographically in 1980. The stories I covered included innumerable requests for approval of the housing developments that are now populated by people who consider any new subdivision an infringement on their rights to a quiet suburban existence; the coming of a cable television franchise to the township (anybody remember Harron Cable TV?) and the ordinance that went with it; and the debate over whether the township should take the offer of free library space at the Chesterbrook Shopping Center. For some reason, the Pulitzer Committee did not take notice.

In the center off all this whirling hoopla was Tredyffrin’s township manager, a clever and occasionally approachable fellow named Norman Mawby, who answered my questions about special exceptions and variances with a patience that could have been undeserved. There are many things that stick out in my mind about Mr. Mawby, but I will tell you three things that won’t embarrass him. First, he continually wore what I came to refer to as the Main Line Uniform – button-down blue dress shirt, dress khakis, tweed sport coat, unassuming tie, brown loafers. Sometimes the coat was a blue blazer, but not often. Second, he was not a chiropractor. Third, his brother, if he had one, was not a pig farmer.

I lost touch with Mr. Mawby when I started covering West Chester, but reconnected with him recently when he wrote a book about the people behind the scenes at Citizens Bank Park after the Phillies had won the 2008 World Series, and I interview him about it. I recognized his voice right away on the phone, although I cannot vouch for whether his wardrobe has changed.

I thought of Tredyffrin and Mr. Mawby on Friday when an envelope appeared underneath my door at the Chester County Justice Center. In it, I found a thank you card in a starling shade of lime green. I opened it, and saw the line scores of the weekend series from the visit my hometown Cincinnati Reds paid to Citizens Bank Park last weekend. They read, “July 8 PHL 4 CIN 3; July 9 PHL 9 CIN 7; July 10 PHL 1 CIN 0; July 11 PHL 1 CIN 0. Thanks for the favor. Norm.”

You are welcome, Mr. Mawby. Or, should I say, Durwood.

Sorry If I Miscommunicate This, But...

This column originally appeared on July 11, 2010.

When I tell you in advance that I am sorry for the subject of this column, it is not simply a matter of diffusing any negative reaction that you, as readers, may have when finished with it. I tell you that I am sorry at the outset because this column, a semi-diatribe against corporate customer service, is neither original nor inspiring – two attributes that I aspire to each time I sit down to compose my weekly thoughts on paper – and also because my apology serves as an ironic counterpoint to the column’s subject itself.

Last month I ordered telephone, Internet, and cable television service from a well known local provider of such technology, whose name will escape mention here but whose identity one could hazard a guess at with a passing glance at the Philadelphia skyline. The price was right, the Phillies still seemed interesting at the time, and change is always a good thing – or so I’m told.

Installation of my new services went swimmingly. The friendly fellow who trundled up the steps to my third floor garret got the task finished in good time, and even complimented me on having a very nice hassock fan that kept him cool while he installed things.

But problems developed soon after he left. For reasons I will not tire you with, my telephone service was incomplete. That is, I could make calls from my phone, but not receive them. Over the next two weeks, I would grapple with the company’s customer service representatives, both on line and over the phone, until all was successfully completed and I became one with the universe once again.

The facet of my mano-e-mano duel over my non-phone service that intrigued, and ultimately frustrated, me the most was the seeming overarching willingness of the customer service folks to apologize to me. In the many, many discussions I had over my non-service, I was told that the person I was speaking to was sorry more times than I can remember. In one discussion -- in which I merely wanted to know what a certain light on my new television box meant -- the on-line person opened the conversation by saying he was sorry for the inconvenience I had suffered. He was pleasantly surprised when I told him I had no problem, just a question. Seems he had been sorry for nothing.


It went on like this for days. One morning, while again recounting the saga of my phone service, the live telephone person said she was sorry for any "miscommunication" I had experienced five times before I stopped counting. A supervisor I discussed things with also opened our conversation by saying he was sorry. He didn’t even know what the problem was, but he wanted me to know that he felt my pain. It drove me a little batty, I admit. At one point I heatedly insisted that someone in my immediate family could die and I wouldn’t be told about it because the phone call couldn’t go through. The hyperbole brought forth a rather languid, “Yes, sir. I am sorry for that.”


Little by little, it dawned on me that they were not really personally sorry at all. They were, instead, corporately sorry. And there is a difference.


As an example, I point you to the tale of Peter Blok of Uwchlan and the 300 or so other passengers on the Virgin Atlantic flight he took from London to Newark, N.J., last month after a golfing vacation that had a unscheduled stopover in Hartford, Conn. After sitting on the un-airconditioned plane and being lied to by the air stewards for five hours, when they finally deplaned an announcement came over the loudspeakers saying that Virgin was “sorry for the inconvenience.” Blok didn’t believe them, and neither do I.

What I now believe is that large corporate institutions believe that if their minions say they are sorry for putting you out, whether they mean it or not, they are somehow off the hook. "Look, buddy, I said I was sorry! What else do you want?' is the common attitude.

Meanwhile, my mechanic, Andy of Downingtown, offered to cut my recent $2,000 repair bill by $500 because it had taken him longer to diagnose the problem that he originally led me to believe. I declined his offer because it wasn’t his fault, but his apology was genuine. I will never take my car anywhere else.

This also came about the time that Nancy Slome, my onetime class mate back at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati, Ohio (Alma Mater: “High on the Hill”), asked rather straightforwardly whether I was the person who stole the mezuzah from the front door of her home when we were teenagers. I admitted it, and explained how awful I felt for doing something so juvenile and harmful. She accepted my apology, and I felt better for it. Not because it got me off the hook, but because, in a small way, I atoned for something I had done wrong.

Anyway, I am sorry if I bored y ou.