life improvement

A decade or more ago, while I was in law school, I bought a keychain at a little True Value hardware store by my school. It was a loop of cable attached to a little round piece of metal. 

Keys slid off and on like a dream with no breaking your fingernail trying to pry the pieces apart wide enough to fit a key on there. In a pinch, I could open the ring and attach it around something so that it would never fall/float/drift away.

I used it alone for a long time and then started attaching it to the ring on my wallet when I started using a little id case with a key ring attached as a wallet. 

It looked like this, only blue:

(image from amazon.com)

Eventually, it started getting a little ragged. I periodically looked for a similar one when I was in a hardware store, but no one had one and the customer service people were uninspired when I asked.

In the last few months, it started fraying. The metal cable inside the plastic is breaking, and I keep stabbing myself in the finger with the little metal pieces. It hurts more than seems reasonable. The little spikes stick in my finger until I pull them out. 

Today, I was running an errand outside of my normal zone. When I got out my keys to get back into the car, I noticed that the fraying has gotten to the point where the cable is going to break in half, so I google-mapped the nearest hardware store.

If you ever wonder where the customer service in the world has gone, I can tell you: it is stored up in this one little store in Gone West.

The guy at the counter got the owner, and the owner found the closest keychain they had (not at all the same) and looked it up in the computer and looked through the other keychains near it in sku and  found the right one and ordered me two of them. And he's thinking about ordering some for the store. Winning. I speak so highly of this keychain that I have sold it to other people now, too. 

(Of course, as soon as I managed to get it ordered from a real store, I also found it on amazon. But you have to order it in sets of five on amazon. Which is not to say that I couldn't use all five. I could. I seriously love these things. Go forth and purchase.* You will not regret it.)

...

* HAHAHAHAHAHA. As if someone paid me to say this. No. No one pays me for jack on this website. Or anywhere, at the moment. I am merely telling you about a product that has made my life better and will improve yours, too.