Day Seventy Seven : 'Being Nice' Day

Date : Monday 18th March 2014

Time : 17.39

Location : Broad Street, Birmingham

Om nom nom nom nom

It's been absolutely ages since I've actually blogged on a day that I've been supposed to - so to speak about something that happened yesterday is nice! 

Yesterday was a day filled with niceness - from my part, and from the part of complete strangers, too. 

Here's the backstory. As I've mentioned many times before, my sister is getting married on Sunday, and I am very honoured to be a member of the wedding party .. Yeah Yeah, I'm an Usher (I can smell the cheese a mile off)

Late Sunday night before I drove back to Birmingham, I stopped at my mums to try my wedding suit on - all was good, it looked great, but the jacket was a touch too big. I'm going to say it was thanks to the weight I've lost this year, rather than an administrative quirk!

I therefore needed to rush to the closest Austin Reed to get fitted. Fine. Until I noticed that the store was closing at 6pm, and I finish work at 5.30pm.

I thought I'd chance my arm, and send the below Tweet, as I knew it'd be touch-and-go as to whether I'd get there on time.

@super_stern We have spoken to the manager Mike and he is happy to keep the store open for you
— Austin Reed (@austin_reed) March 17, 2014

I genuinely couldn't believe a) they replied, and b) the outcome.

I go back to my Topman day's, if someone would have asked me this, I'd have kindly told them to go away (in not as many words .... and not so kindly).

I also felt quite bad, because my initial Tweet seems quite rude, but negotiating my request in 140 characters proved to be a difficult task!

Knowing that Manager Mike (as I shall now refer to him as) was willing to keep the store open for me, I thought I'd nip into Tesco and reward him for his incredibly kind gesture. I should, at this point, highlight the fact that I was still rushing to get to the city centre store, I wasn't just chilling out and taking my time. Actual sweat formed on my forehead.

Annoyingly, I actually got to the store at 17.58 ... so the whole Tweeting debacle need not ever had happened.

Then an awkward thing happened. Manager Mike said that actually, he was planning on staying a little bit late anyway, so would have let me in if I'd have turned up at 5 or 10 past. But I still felt the need to hand over the chocs.

He didn't know what to say. I didn't know what to say. But it felt like the right thing to do!

Lesson learnt today - Appreciate people and little gestures really do go a long way! 

Note. As someone who works in Social Media - THIS is how businesses should be - responsive, helpful and polite.

Also, to anyone reading this who wants to follow me on Twitter, my handle is @Super_Stern