Following Up

A quick update on my poster status: I have one! And it’s signed!

I was, you might say, VERY unhappy about the poster shortage at the National Championship celebration event (OMG THAT’S RIGHT UMD MEN WON THE NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP!!!!!!!!!! I get excited anew just thinking about it). I endured a long drive, a long line, and what ended up being a semi-long illness only to find out I was going to have to awkwardly go through the autograph line empty-handed.

I complained on Twitter, and it worked! I have a poster! Josh, the athletic director (the REAL AD, not the fake assistant AD who was rude to me) and Brian, one of the assistant ADs, acknowledged the situation and offered a solution: if I emailed them with my address, I could get a poster when they printed more.

I’m not in customer service anymore per se (although we all gotta serve somebody), but this one-two punch is going to solve almost every customer service issue on the planet, unless the customer is completely unreasonable, the service provider is acting in bad faith, or something really, really, really bad and irreversible happened. Acknowledge the customer’s frustration and provide a remedy. I mean, I am a somewhat unreasonable person and I was not only placated but motivated to share this as a positive situation. Yes it’s almost two weeks later but let’s be real: ain’t nobody reading this blog no more – I shared it on Twitter right away.

Anyway, I was okay with this solution – at least I’d get a poster. What I didn’t expect is they would provide a signed poster in a media envelope with cardboard to protect it from bending or folding. I was pretty excited to receive almost exactly what I was hoping for in the first place, with the exception of one thing: Blake Young didn’t get the chance to sign “play your balls off” on my poster. A tragedy, for sure.

This is sort of an embarrassing amount of time to spend talking about something so inconsequential – it’s a freaking poster with writing on it – but I try not to dwell too hard on these things because I’d start questioning almost everything I do. Like, there are real problems in the world, why would I wait in line for two hours just to talk to a bunch of college men who use a composite stick to put a rubber disc in a metal and twine* — OH MY GOD STOP.

*shoutout to LGDU