There are some cases with customer experiences that they mark you for a long time. This is one of those stories for me as it made me create a stereotype in my mind.

The story takes place in the city that I currently leave, during the second year of the Corona virus pandemic. At that time, we had started reluctantly traveling again abroad for business. The additional challenge for me was that I had to take a covid test each time I came back home, not because of government regulations, but because we had a newborn at home. There were no vaccines for babies, and I didn’t want to take any chances with him. The challenge in this case is that one time I returned quite late, so most the pharmacies (where we could take the basic test) were closed. The airport did not have facilities for such tests (as compared to the airport of the capital which had 24/7 services of such kind) and the only other alternative was to take it in a private hospital. So, I called the local private hospital, near the airport, one of the biggest in the Balkans, attracting clients from all the surrounding countries. It was 21:40 that I called them, and they told me that “the lab closes at 22:00, you will not make it”. They did not know where I was, and how much time I needed to be there. They just told me not to come and they laughed…they laughed because they told me “Now that you called, it is too late” as if they wanted to close early and get rid of me. I was in a need, and they did not care at all. In Greece we say that we have “filotimo”, an internal sense of duty. Obviously, they had no filotimo at all. All they cared was to finish the shift, regardless of working on a sector that staying a little bit later made a difference.

Conclusion

In some services, they see everything as a transaction. They do not care to go the extra mile, and some in some cases they do not even understand the sense of duty that certain services have. This particular case made me think and reevaluated certain similar encounters I had in this city, in a professional context. I came to the conclusion that the average worker here is…lazier that the rest of the country. Not only employees but also bosses. Pharmacists for example do not compete each other who is going to open for more days or more hours. They might not even open during hours that other shops normally work. Or you visit a shop near closing time, and you realize that the shop closed earlier. Perhaps the only sector that manages to escape this stereotype is the hospitality and restaurant sector where there is a lot of competition.

By the way, the airport authorities in the city realized their mistake and after a couple of months they extended the 24/7 testing service. You cannot expect to be a tourist hub and be closed half of the day when testing was mandatory for certain countries of destination.

PS.

Regarding the overnight testing…there was a business opportunity hidden! If you asked the right people, you could find somebody to come to your place, test you and send you results in 1 hour! By paying something extra of course (100 Euros instead of 30). So perhaps it is not that they were lazy, it is that they did not care (or they had side-business).