The best customer service is no customer service.

I came to this apparently self-contradictory conclusion this morning after I read a letter to the editor of my local small-town paper, the Charlottesville Daily Progress (Ain't it great? Apologies to John Travolta. But I digress).

Some woman wrote in about how appalled she was when some checkout clerk at some big-box store blabbed with her friend working in the next checkout line over while checking her stuff out.

She sniffed that she'll never patronize that store again. Ha. If she keeps this up, she'll never shop again.

As I'm reading Steve Krug's superb book, Don't Make Me Think: A Common-Sense Approach to Web Usability, I'm struck by the truth of his title as a guide to the best way to do almost anything, web-related or not.

The ultimate in excellent interactions is not even knowing you're having one, it's so transparent. Good function should be much like water to a fish: it's the medium you're in, and you aren't even aware of it as such.

I'm reminded of a book written by an author whose name is beyond great: Maxwell Maltz. His book was called Psycho-Cybernetics, and it was worth reading just for this one wonderful line, buried somewhere in the endless pages of psychobabble gibberish: "The best response is no response."

This pithy six-word sentence has made my life so much better. It works.