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So here is my profound thought for the day: This is the first time I have met someone who seeks out people and who sees beyond. That may seem trivial but I think it is profound all the same. We never look beyond our assumptions and, what's worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves. We don't recognize each other because other people have become our permanent mirrors. If we actually realized this, if we were to become aware of the fact that we are only ever looking at ourselves in the other person, that we are alone in the wilderness, we would go crazy. When my mother offers macaroons from Chez Laduree to Madame de Broglie, she is telling herself her own life story and just nibbling at her own flavor; when Papa drinks his coffee and reads his paper, he is contemplating his own reflection in the mirror, as if practicing the Coue method or something; when Colombe talks about Marian's lectures, she is ranting about her own reflection; and when people walk by the concierge, all they see is a void, because she is not from their world.
As for me, I implore fate to give me the chance to see beyond myself and truly meet someone.
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Muriel Barbery (The Elegance of the Hedgehog)
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My husband believed I might die. And he didn't so much as even call the concierge. A switch flipped in me. I knew, right there and then, I needed to get away from this person. He wasn't gonna kill me but he would let me die.
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Taylor Jenkins Reid (Daisy Jones & The Six)
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Serving the customer (“customer service”) is not becoming a personal concierge and catering to their every whim and want. Customer service is providing an excellent product at an acceptable price and solving legitimate problems (lost packages, replacements, refunds, etc.) in the fastest manner possible. That’s it.
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Timothy Ferriss (The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich)
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Ezra asked me to bring you this,' I said and handed him the jar. 'He said you would know what it was.'
He took the jar and looked at it. Then he threw it at me. It struck me on the chest or the shoulder and rolled down the stairs.
'You son of a bitch,' he said. 'You bastard.'
'Ezra said you might need it,' I said. He countered that by throwing a milk bottle.
'You are sure you don't need it?' I asked.
He threw another milk bottle. I retreated and he hit me with yet another milk bottle in the back. Then he shut the door.
I picked up the jar which was only slightly cracked and put it in my pocket.
'He did not seem to want the gift of Monsieur Pound," I said to the concierge.
'Perhaps he will be tranquil now,' she said.
'Perhaps he has some of his own,' I said.
'Poor Monsieur Dunning,' she said.
The lovers of poetry that Ezra organized rallied to Dunning's aid again eventually. My own intervention and that of the concierge had been unsuccessful. The jar of alleged opium which had been cracked I stored wrapped in waxed paper and carefully tied in one of an old pair of riding boots. When Evan Shipman and I were removing my personal effects from that apartment some years later the boots were still there but the jar was gone. I do not know why Dunning threw the milk bottles at me unless he remembered my lack of credulity the night of his first dying, or whether it was only an innate dislike of my personality. But I remember the happiness that the phrase 'Monsieur Dunning est monté sur le toit et refuse catégoriquement de descendre' gave to Evan Shipman. He believed there was something symbolic about it. I would not know. Perhaps Dunning took me for an agent of evil or of the police. I only know that Ezra tried to be kind to Dunning as he was kind to so many people and I always hoped Dunning was as fine a poet as Ezra believed him to be. For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle. But Ezra, who was a very good poet, played a good game of tennis too. Evan Shipman, who was a very fine poet and who truly did not care if his poems were ever published, felt that it should remain a mystery.
'We need more true mystery in our lives, Hem,' he once said to me. 'The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most at this time. There is, of course, the problem of sustenance.
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Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast)
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Your breakthrough agency should have six specialized customer-facing departments: personal lines, commercial lines, life and health, front office and claims concierge, financial services, and marketing.
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Bart Baker (The Breakthrough Insurance Agency: How to Multiply Your Income, Time and Fun)
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And so, in 1991, he created an experiment. He arranged for large numbers of college students who wanted to become doctors to be given hospital greens and a place to sleep near the emergency room. Their job was to serve as concierges to the homeless. When a homeless person entered the emergency room, they were to tend to his every need. Fetch him juice and a sandwich, sit down and talk to him, help arrange for his medical care. The college students worked for free. They loved it: They got to pretend to be doctors. But they serviced only half of the homeless people who entered the hospital. The other half received the usual curt and dismissive service from the nursing staff. Redelmeier then tracked the subsequent use of the Toronto health care system by all the homeless people who had visited his hospital. Unsurprisingly, the group that received the gold-plated concierge service tended to return slightly more often to the hospital where they had received it than the unlucky group. The surprise was that their use of the greater Toronto health care system declined. When homeless people felt taken care of by a hospital, they didn’t look for other hospitals that might take care of them. The homeless said, “That was the best that can be done for me.” The entire Toronto health care system had been paying a price for its attitude to the homeless.
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Michael Lewis (The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds)
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Yes, I am a personal research concierge to a wide variety of people who hate the internet. - Linda Holmes, Flying Solo
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Linda Holmes
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In the center are the words The Personal Concierge, and radiating out like spokes on a wheel are lines that end in circled names: Bull, Leslee, Lamont, Kacy.
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Elin Hilderbrand (Swan Song (Nantucket, #4))
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Henry Ford once said, referring to his Model-T, the bestselling car of all time,fn7 “The customer can have any color he wants, so long as it’s black.” He understood something that businesspeople seem to have forgotten: Serving the customer (“customer service”) is not becoming a personal concierge and catering to their every whim and want. Customer service is providing an excellent product at an acceptable price and solving legitimate problems (lost packages, replacements, refunds, etc.) in the fastest manner possible. That’s it.
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Timothy Ferriss (The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich)
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treated them all as if he were their personal law enforcement concierge.
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Lee Goldberg (Bone Canyon (Eve Ronin, #2))
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But the luxury concierge sector, a game of global access with just a handful of key players, takes personal services to the extreme. This niche traces its origins to circa 1929, when the concierges of all the grand hotels of Paris teamed up to create Les Clefs d’Or—the Golden Keys—a network meant to help its members cater to their well-heeled guests. Clefs d’Or now functions as a global fraternity of more than four thousand hotel concierges. To join, a person must have five years of hospitality experience, pass a “comprehensive test,” and otherwise prove, “beyond doubt, their ability to deliver highest quality of service.” Of the tens of thousands of hotel concierges in the United States, only about 660 have earned the right to wear Les Clefs’ crossed-keys emblem
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Michael Mechanic (Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All)
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You feel like you’re in a high-end furniture store, or even a spa, for that matter. Just very stately, appointed, everything is very intentional,” says forty-four-year-old Scott Pope. Pope is the CEO of ROAMD, a network of nearly one hundred membership-based concierge medical practices. He’s a pharmacist by training, and a concierge patient in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he lives. Joining ROAMD lets concierge doctors extend their wealthy clients the same level of attention while traveling that they enjoy at home. For annual fees typically ranging from $2,000 to $10,000 per head—some docs charge up to $40,000—a person can expect highly individualized, proactive, and unusually private primary care.
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Michael Mechanic (Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All)
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When the pandemic came along, concierge doctors got busy. Dr. Jordan Shlain, a ROAMD investor and founder of the California-based concierge practice Private Medical, was sourcing viral tests as early as January 2020. “He procured testing supplies and [personal protective equipment] long before the federal government was waving the flag and warning people that this was coming,” Pope says. “Jordan is a beacon of light in what is otherwise a complete mess.
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Michael Mechanic (Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All)
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Printoutloud
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Golden Rule #1: Each delegated task must be both time-consuming and well-defined. If you’re running around like a chicken with its head cut off and assign your VA to do that for you, it doesn’t improve the order of the universe. Golden Rule #2: On a lighter note, have some fun with it. Have someone in Bangalore or Shanghai send e-mails to friends as your personal concierge to set lunch dates or similar basics. Harass your boss with odd phone calls in strong accents from unknown numbers. Being effective doesn’t mean being serious all the time. It’s fun being in control for a change. Get a bit of repression off your chest so it doesn’t turn into a complex later.
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Timothy Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek)
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It was Jenny’s turn to nod. “That’s why we brought along an extra suit.” Jenny’s blue eyes filled with concern. “Did you tell her what I said?” “Yes, but I thought she’d get more out of it if she heard it from you in person. We pick her up at ten o’clock on Friday morning.” They stopped by the concierge desk long enough to make arrangements for Jenny’s videos. Joanna also increased the Thanksgiving dinner reservation from four to six. “Who’s coming to dinner?” Jenny asked as they, too, headed for the elevator. “Leann Jessup,” Joanna answered. “She’s a new friend, someone I met here at school. And
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J.A. Jance (Shoot Don't Shoot (Joanna Brady, #3))