I had my first encounter with Vietnamese cuisine last month. I noticed that after the busser cleared the dirty dishes from a table, a man would appear tableside.  He held a richly ornamented porcelain bowl in one hand and a bamboo calligraphy brush in the other.

Before the fresh set-ups and napkins were laid, he dipped the brush into the bowl, leaned in and painted a graceful pattern of liquid on the table cloth.  His whole body swayed with the tightly coiled, slow motion precision of some Oriental martial arts practitioner.  The brush strokes portrayed an elegant economy of movement born of long practice.

What exotic ritual was I beholding?  What was the liquid?  There was the faint aroma of citrus.  Orange flower water, perhaps?  

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Thoroughly charmed by what I was seeing, I had speculated out loud to my lunch companions that it might be some sort of ceremonial table blessing.  After all,  people from nearly all regions of the Orient set great store in the ambiance of food.  I called over one of the servers.

“What is that guy doing at the table before the next customers sit,” I asked, prepared to receive an answer about invoking the benevolence of the kitchen gods to preside over flavorful fine dining.  My informant glanced in the calligrapher’s direction.

“He’s pre-treating the stains on the table cloth with a little bit of soapy water.”

Oh.

Customer expectations are sometimes like my first Vietnamese lunch. They build up a situation to be more than it actually is.  It becomes the business’ task to deflate expectations to face value.  Therein lies the primary peril of customer service.

The sharp edge of a reality check can cut both ways, particularly when customers want to believe what a company says.  And they do want to believe.  On the whole, that is why advertising still works in this country.  That is the reason honest advertising says what it means and means what it says.

A case in point is an Arizona-based online company that sells a line of extraordinarily specialized products with a 500 percent money-back guarantee if they fail to work.

The company’s product line includes self-administered drug testing kits and artificial urine sold in convenient clear plastic pouches along with instructions on how to heat the pouch so that it registers body temperature when discharged into a specimen cup. (Think about that the next time you’re tempted to warm up something in a convenience store microwave.)

It also sells a line of shampoos and mouthwashes that it says will temporarily render certain, um, uhhh ... “toxins” in the body undetectable for as long as five hours.

A complainant to the Better Business Bureau (BBB) wants his 500 percent refund because he used the shampoo then flunked a pre-employment drug-use screening and lost out on a job with a six-figure salary.  He smoked marijuana several months ago in a European city where, he takes pains to point out, it is perfectly legal to do so.

To its credit, the company responded to the BBB.  It says it will honor the terms of the warranty and give the 500 percent refund when it receives a purchase receipt, identifying information from the packaging and proof the product did not work as promised.

There is the Catch-22.  The only documentary proof the shampoo didn’t work is the lab report. The prospective employer pays for the screening and so the report is its property.  The lab report is not made available to the applicant/shampoo user. 

And businesses wonder why consumers don’t trust them more!

 Tom Collier is president of the Better Business Bureau of Southern Arizona, which serves Pima, Cochise, Santa Cruz, Graham and Greenlee counties in Arizona and all of the state of Sonora in Mexico. The BBB office is a 434 S. Williams Blvd., Suite 102. The telephone number is (520) 888-5353 or 1-800-696-2827 toll-free outside of Tucson. The website is

www.tucson.bbb.org.