That’s what the sign said above my most audacious friend.  He loves that guarantee.  He’s seen that sign at many places and loves to test the limits of its meaning, sometimes to the chagrin of his cringing kids, wife, or friends.  One time he had a ceiling fan that broke, and so he pulled it down along with two others that matched it and returned them to a well-known home improvement store.  The clerk checked the model number of the fans my friend wrestled into the service counter-line, and said it’s been seven years since we had this model.  He said, yes, he bought them about ten years before, and they were supposed to have a life-time warranty, and you claim satisfaction guaranteed!  Well do you have a receipt, he says no, he just wanted equivalent replacements.  With much grumbling and head shaking, he got his new fans for no cost!  The fans looked great and we had plenty of laughs over drinks at his score of new fans.

That was a long time ago, and now my friend is a very successful executive, but he cannot help himself, he still has to get his satisfaction.   A few days ago, he was in the process of moving his son from a four-year stay at a prestigious university when his son said we need to toss this mattress, its shot and I don’t want to bother moving it.  Well the mattress was four years old and cost about $1,000 when bought at a well-known discount-membership store.  He said, well I’m sure that came with Satisfaction Guaranteed!  So, along with his son and a friend of his son, they bundled the mattress into a mini-van and took it to the store.

Soon the mattress-team find themselves in the service-line with a mattress with stains on it, (one large stain that we haven’t heard an explanation for at this writing) and with a bow in the middle and people staring and asking them what they could be doing with this old mattress.  The boys stood waiting with obvious embarrassment, but my friend stood stoic in his certainty of guaranteed satisfaction.  One 80 some-year-old gentleman asked my friend’s son what they were doing with the mattress.  When he explained it to him, he said “look how its bowed here!”  The old guy pumped his fist forward and back, forward and back, and said ah ha, too much of this I see!  He laughed hard and wandered on into the store.   The girl at the service desk scanned the bar-code, and said you purchased this four years ago.  My audacious friend said yes, and I’m not satisfied with it.  She said I need to call a manager.  The manager came, and asked why didn’t you return this sooner if you weren’t satisfied?  He said, I wasn’t here enough to know that the mattress wasn’t performing to our satisfaction.  Besides there’s no time limit on my satisfaction is there?  He got a store credit!  A $1000 for buying a new mattress at his son’s next residence.  We had some great laughs as we celebrated this great institution of customer satisfaction… Sometimes it pays to be audacious!