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I had a remarkably good customer-service day yesterday. And since I complain so much about the bad incidents, I figure I should also mention some unusually good ones.

Best phone customer service of the day (in fact, of the year so far) goes to the Citi credit-card person I spoke with. I had gotten a special offer from them in papermail, so I called the number on the letter to get off their mailing list, but instead of letting me talk to a human, that automatically signed me up for the offer. So I called the number on my card, mad and annoyed and ready to argue. But the system connected me to a human immediately, and she was calm and friendly. She said that there was no sign of my having been signed up for the offer (I suspect it just hasn't gone through yet), and when I said I wanted to get off the mailing list, she immediately took me off.

Which was all nice, but the part that elevated it into really good customer service was that she then discovered about four other spam-contact methods that I could opt out of, asked me about each of them, and (at my request/agreement) opted me out of all of them. I dunno whether she was going beyond the call of duty or whether that was just their normal script to follow, but either way she took the underlying intent of my request and offered me things that I wanted but hadn't even known to ask for. That's really cool.

(We will gloss over the fact that Citi has four or five different ways to spam you, and that they apparently opt you in to those things by default.)

At other points in the day, I talked with three different people from my credit union, all of whom were friendly and helpful and knowledgeable and resolved my issues quickly.

And the furniture delivery people from Restoration Hardware not only delivered and put together my new furniture, but took apart the old bed and moved it upstairs and put it back together for me, at no extra charge. (I tipped them well.)

So, all in all, a bunch of good interactions with people working for various companies. I'm pleased.