Customer service
Let me tell you about the smoothest bit of customer service I've ever experienced, so smooth in fact that I didn't notice it while it was happening.
I was checking into a DoubleTree hotel in London. The DoubleTree is my kind of hotel: any fancier, and you're wildly overpaying. Go anywhere cheaper and you might not get roasted tomatoes at the breakfast bar. (I've stayed at a Hampton twice, in two different countries, and twice my key card spontaneously stopped working. It's not a statistically significant sample, but as they say, it's still weird that it happened twice.)
It had been an early morning for me to catch a flight that had been severely delayed because of fog. That in itself is not too bad; I was in no particular hurry, but several other flights had already been cancelled and there was no guarantee that we would ever depart.
I'll say one thing for British Airways: they keep you up to date. We were inundated with a veritable flood of announcements by the pilots, keeping us abreast of the latest forecast, runway changes, intricate details of flight management software, and more, all using an impressive number of different ways to say sorry, despite none of this being remotely their fault.
These announcements were only slightly drowned out by the loud American gentleman sitting behind me, who was on the phone to his partner and kept complaining that he didn't know what was going on.
What I'm saying is that I was not feeling too fresh when I finally made it to the front desk.1
I was welcomed by a friendly employee who asked me about my trip and checked me in.
When I got to my room, I couldn't for the life of me get the door to unlock. "How hard can it be?", you may fairly ask. I will get back to that.
With my earlier experience at the Hampton in mind, I reached the conclusion that something must have gone wrong with programming the key cards, and I made my way back to the front desk.
"Oh, no problem sir, let me just program those cards for you again, this happens sometimes" said the same friendly gentleman as before.
He then, despite my protestations, insisted on walking back to the room with me, just to be on hand in case, despite all odds, something went wrong again.
While in the lift, he cheerily and confidently theorised that maybe I had held them too close to my phone, and something had gone wrong in that way.
Somewhere at the back of my mind, something was waving a little flag, indicating something wasn't quite adding up. I shrugged it off.
We arrived back at the room. He inserted the card in the slot, opened the door for me, and bade me a pleasant stay.
I didn't think much of this until the following day.
I was once again standing there fumbling with the key card, and once again the door wouldn't unlock. Determined to not have to ask for help again, and buoyed up this time with a proper night's sleep and some coffee, I analysed the situation.
The problem was twofold. A key card can really only be inserted into a vertical slot in two orientations: front or back doesn't matter, because the chip can be read from either direction, and you can't put the broad side in first because you are constrained by the dimensions of the slot. So all you can do wrong is to put it in upside down, which is exactly what I had consistently been doing.2
I had been misled by the writing on the card, which was aligned vertically along one edge in such a way that putting the key in the correct way felt like I was inserting it upside down. It turns out I'm very suggestible when it comes to writing orientation. Derren Brown probably wouldn't have much trouble pulling a fast one on me.
The other issue is that these locks, unlike any other hotel door locks I've ever come across, don't make a noise. I was used to presenting my card to the reader and then hearing a mechanical whirring noise to indicate a successful unlocking. These locks just sit there silently so even when I succeeded, I didn't notice it. The noise only comes when you remove the key card from the slot -- but if you wait too long, it times out and this no longer happens. I had been triggering the timeout by waiting for a confirmation sound that never came.
And then it dawned on me.
The front desk clerk had known all along that there was nothing wrong with my key cards -- he had certainly seen that while he was making a show of reprogramming them. He had instantly understood the situation, probably having seen it hundreds of times before, and insisted on going back to the room with me so he could discreetly demonstrate to me how to unlock the door. His talk about phones damaging the keys was obviously nonsense -- I knew this at the time, of course; I know phones can write to NFC chips but I also know they don't just do this randomly. The man's warmth and friendliness were so comforting that I never asked any questions.
It remains to this day the most impressive display of customer service I have ever seen. If I have ever come across anything better, I haven't noticed it.
Someone had also asked me for directions, which rattled me a bit. I seem in recent years to have developed the kind of face that causes people to think I know my way around. I only very rarely do. The only place this never happened is Tokyo, possibly because I don't look like a local, or possibly because everybody knows that the Shinjuku station exits are alive and switch places during the night.↩
Arguably the fact that any orientation is significant is a major design flaw. Most NFC cards have an antenna all around the card, which is why you don't need to hold your credit card in a specific way to pay. The curse of knowledge strikes again. The whole scenario would have made more sense if it was a magstripe, but I don't think it was; the lock was one of those fancy new ones that you can unlock with your phone. The app doesn't work, but that's a rant for another time.↩