Customer Service

I don’t think there’s a phrase in Norwegian that means “customer service” because I don’t think they understand the concept.  It was such a shock for me when I lived there, having been pampered by the American way of life.

In the past, whenever I shopped in Norway, no employees ever even asked if I needed help.  Lately, however, at least that’s begun to change.  But even now, no cashier ever calls for back-up, even if the line is ridiculously long.

I usually just let go of the “Customer is King” mentality when in Norway, but a few times I was pushed over the edge and wished I could’ve demanded my natural born American rights of what is decent and fair in business.

I bought a modem when we lived there so we could have Internet access in our home.  I paid cash for it, took it home and waited, sadly, for a month before the installer came to hook it all up.

A few weeks after my modem and laptop were up and running, I received the exact same modem in the mail.  Soon thereafter I got my first bill and saw I was billed for it, along with the equivalent of twenty dollars for shipping. 

I took the extra modem back and told them someone made a mistake, and why would they ship me another modem after it was obvious I was already hooked up with one, anyway?  The guy just shrugged his shoulders and reimbursed my account the cost of the modem, but wouldn’t reimburse me the cost of shipping.  I told him it wasn’t my fault someone messed up and he said, “Yes, but they did have to pay to ship it to you, so they need to be reimbursed for that.”  I argued with him using my American logic that it wasn’t right I pay for something that wasn’t my fault, but there was no changing his mind.   

Another time I had a similar experience with an after-school program my son attended.  They made a billing mistake, so I pointed it out to them.  They agreed they had made a mistake and they sent me a new bill, but by the time I got it, it was overdue, so it came with a ten-dollar late fee.  They wouldn’t budge on that one either, no matter how much I pointed out how unfair it was that I had to pay a late fee because I was waiting for a corrected bill from them. “It’s a computer,” the woman argued, “ I can’t tell the computer what’s fair, so you just have to pay it.” 

Norwegian logic always wins, as I’ve come to know, being married to one for more than two decades now.