by Tom Blair
Columnist

The word “Service” doesn’t really mean much these days, it’s nothing like the good ole days when a service station offered real service. You young people have no idea what it’s like to pull in to a SERVICE station and the attendant would ask you how much gas you wanted, check your oil and transmission if you wanted and wash your windows and sometime he’d say, “That tire on the right rear looks a little low… I’ll check it for ya.”

Believe it or not, you could sit in the car all the time and the attendant would take your money or credit card, ring it up and bring it back out to you. That’s service!

Those of us who got to use drive-ins for food service knew what service was too. Just sit in our car and order the food from a real person and it would be cheerfully delivered to the car. We’d sit there with the kids, enjoying our meal and watching everyone else around us.

We had a milkman…a what? Yes, a milkman who would service us with dairy product right to the door. We had grocery stores that had young people as “baggers” that would bag our groceries and carry them out to the car, our local hardware store would come to the house to install and repair a washer or dryer and many time… for nothing if we bought it from him.

When we had a problem we could call customer SERVICE and actually talk to a real human about a problem with anything. No computer voices with 100 different options to choose from, no annoying commercials to listen to and no computer voice telling us how important our call is.

WE do still have the Internal Revenue Service, the Telephone service, Cable service, The US Postal service, Public service, Governmental services and “CUSTOMER SERVICE.”

Most of the time they don’t “listen” to us… the only people who are really listening are the National Security Agency and the CIA… and they ain’t thinking about “service.”

I remember when I was a kid on the farm, hearing my dad talking about getting a bull… to ‘service’ a few cows. I didn’t understand what it meant then, but BAM!!! It all came into focus… Now I understand what SERVICE means today!

Tom “Road” Blair

Website: www.tomroadblair.com