A Great Deal ... More.
Hello. Welcome to the Weekend Gene Pool, which involves a bargain. It is not just the standard bargain we make here week after week, that we’ll entertain you in return for your personal anecdotes. This challenge is also about bargains.
Here’s a phone conversation I had years ago with a customer service rep at Pegasus Laboratories, a pharmaceuticals company in Pensacola, Fla. I put it in a column.
Shannon: Hi. What can I help you with?
Me: I swear this is true. My beloved dog, Murphy, sleeps with me on my bed, sometimes at the foot and sometimes right beside me on a pillow. One day a couple of years ago I woke up very unpleasantly, like that snotty movie producer in "The Godfather" who owned a racehorse. My bed was also very warm and very wet. It turned out that Murphy, who is a big dog, had completely lost control of all bladder functions, a condition that my vet said, if untreated, could continue nightly for the rest of her life. The vet prescribed Proin, a product made by your company. Murphy has been taking daily doses of Proin ever since, and the problem has not returned. By my calculation, I spend about $75 a month to avoid sleeping in pee. My question is … are you people crazy? You should be charging much more. I would pay anything for this product, and make any sacrifice. I would go without beer, if that's what it took, and ...
Shannon: Sir.
Me: Ma'am.
Shannon: I don't want you to have to sacrifice beer. And I am glad our pricing allows you to accommodate both products.
Me: Shannon, you sound almost … moved.
Shannon: We are very proud of it.
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So, that’s your question this week. Tell us about a product, or service, that you would pay a great deal more for it than you currently pay (or once paid) if required. Any type of product or service. (Coca-Cola was once famously cited in this context.) Elaborate. Be entertaining. Send it here, to This Button:
I was going to exempt personal medicines from this challenge — I figured it would be both obvious and unfunny. Consider my lame offering: If I didn’t take the hypertension meds lisinopril and metoprolol, which I take every day, I would have long ago stroked out like a fat guy with an incipient aneurysm in a rugby scrum. So I decided I’ll let you go there if and only if you can do a lot better than that.
In that vein (haha) I will gift you with a very simple bonus riddle: A blind man is marooned on a desert island. He knows he will be rescued in two days. He also knows he has exactly four pills that can save his life till the rescue. The problem is that two of the pills are red and two are blue, but they are the same size and shape, and they smell the same. No name or number is etched into them. To stay alive, the man must take exactly one red pill and exactly one blue pill each day, no more, no less; if he doesn’t do that, he will die.
Alas, his four pills got jumbled together. How does he stay alive? There are two correct answers.
Your task is to:
Google it, and go “oh!” and keep it to yourself, or to …
Make a guess and send it in.
YOU MAY NOT DO BOTH. You are on your honor, which I happen to know is sacred to you.
Send it to that button up above, or this one. They go to the same place:
And now for the Gene Pool Gene Poll:
The conversation atop was one of hundreds I did over the years for my humor column in The Washington Post. I would call customer service reps, and complain / ask about wacky things. These columns were the single most controversial thing I did: A little more than half the readers loved them, and a little less than half hated them.
Okay, see you on Tuesday. I’ve got a surprise mystery guest.
I guess this is sort of about something I'd pay more for. I had a Waterpik. The hose started leaking. I went to the Waterpik website and found that I could get a new hose/pik assembly for a fairly reasonable price (certainly much less than the cost of a new device), so I tried to order it. My attempts were repeatedly met with failure, so I called the customer service number. To my surprise, the agent who answered was actually in the U.S. (Colorado) and was very helpful. By chance I had looked up when I bought the Waterpik, and she informed me that it was still under warranty. Sure enough, I had recorded that it had a two-year warranty (another surprise--almost unheard-of these days). So she sent me the replacement part at no charge.
Several years later, I started having difficulty with the same part and would have ordered a replacement part again, but by this time my husband had entered the picture. He'd been having dental problems and had been ordered to use a water flosser. He couldn't get the Waterpik to work, and I accused him of having broken it, so he was willing to buy a replacement device. But instead of buying a new Waterpik, he bought something else cheaper that supposedly had better features. Two things: he has never used it, and I have never liked it. When it finally breaks, I'm getting another Waterpik.
OK, Gene, you're not just trolling for readers who say, "A subscription to the Gene Pool," are you?