The Sweet Service Award goes to the Mercedes Benz workshop in Century City. A customer stopped at the workshop, to have an engine warning light checked out. An electronic diagnostic reading was done, and the mechanic quickly did something, and the warning light disappeared. A few days earlier the customer had gone to the Culemborg branch for the same problem, and was quoted R 13 000 to fix the throttle problem. The Century City branch did not charge at all, and even replaced a faulty headlight bulb. All of this on the afternoon before the long weekend, when the workshop staff only had one goal, and that was to finish off and go home.
The Sour Service Award goes to Amatomu.com, a blog aggregator that ranks blogs on the basis of number of readers. Almost once a day the website goes down. In general, it takes long for the Statistics page to open, sometimes taking 10 minutes or more. If the site did not contain such valuable information (number of readers throughout the day, the blog posts and tags that brought the readers to the site, and trend information on daily readership), one would have long given up on it.
The WhaleTales Sweet & Sour Service Awards are presented every Friday on the WhaleTales blog. Nominations for the Sweet and Sour Service Awards can be sent to Chris von Ulmenstein at info@whalecottage.com. Past winners of the Sweet and Sour Service Awards can be read on the Friday posts of this blog, and in the WhaleTales newsletters on the www.whalecottage.com website.