The Good, The Bad and the Tanned

Doing business with nice people is a blessing. Doing business with people who don't care and aren't good business people... well, it sucks... especially from thousands of miles away.

So, any of you who know me well know two things about me. I'm a planner and am usually pretty good at managing the details of a trip. And, usually about now... a few days before leaving I'm in a panic over all the work we have to do and other crap. I'm usually thinking... how much will it cost me to cancel the trip today and will Twila divorce me if I do. Yes... that's where I was about an hour ago. And, then I talked to Wendy in Hawaii.

“Hi, This is Wendy returning your call. You sounded a little desperate so I thought I better pull over and call you right back. What can I do for you?”

So, over a month ago I had a nice thought. YES... I can be nice... sometimes. I knew that Twila and Gretchen were both going to spend a lot of time in front of my cameras on this trip and they would also be modeling with local models who already have beautiful Hawaii hued skin or amazing Hawaiian tans... or both. While I know both of them have been getting some sun they have both been working hard and would not have a truly good tan... yet. "What to do? I wonder if they do spray tans on Maui," I thought. Why, how about that, they do... at least according to Google.

So, I did a little research and found a company that would actually come to us and do the tan in our villa. Hard to beat that so I scheduled a tan for each of them for this Saturday morning. That was in mid-May. I received a confirmation and put it out of my mind. Until this weekend.

Being me, over the weekend I began to follow up on all the stuff I have scheduled to be sure it was all in place. Everything looked good... except the tans. I had sent them an email. No response. I called. No answer. I texted. Again, no response. So, today I tried again. No answer. Twila checked our credit card and nothing had been charged. Not a good sign.

The one thing that was truly unacceptable was letting Twila and Gretchen down after promising them a custom in-villa spray tan. So, I started looking for another vendor. Confidence was not high as nearly everything I've looked at in the past couple of weeks has been totally booked up. But I found Maui Elegant Tan... another mobile tanning service. I search around and found the owners phone number and called it not expecting any success. It rang a lot of times and I was about to hang up when I got a message to leave a message... which I did. Evidently my voice sounded as upset and panicked as I was since the first service had let me down so badly.

A few minutes later Ms. Wendy called me back and was so nice. I explained my situation and that I might not survive the flight if I didn't get this worked out. I could see Gretchen and Twila tossing me out of the jet door at 40,000 feet and yelling... "Hope you get a tan on the way down!" But, it was Wendy to the rescue. She made room for both girls on Saturday morning and even talked to Twila for a few minutes about what would get them the best results.

So, as I always say, "God looks out for fools and little children... and I have not been a little child in about 60 years." Be sure and watch for a Saturday post of the actual before and after tanning experience.

4 days and counting. Hawaii... here we come!