I landed one day at the downtown airport in Oklahoma City. I was flying my privately-owned Cessna 170, but was on company business for my employer. The ramp was crowded that day and I couldn't find a place to park. I found it peculiar that no one emerged from the line shack or operations area to guide me. I was a potential customer.

Seeing no one, I taxied down to the end of a long line of airplanes and parked beside the last one. I shut down the engine and as my propeller coasted to a stop, unbuckled and stepped out onto the tarmac. It was then one of the lineboys decided to notice me. As he approached the airplane, instead of asking how he could help me, he very sharply told me "you can't park there."

"Where can I park?" I asked.

"I don't know, but you can't park there.  Maybe down near the other end of the ramp."

I climbed back in the airplane, managed to restart the hot engine (not always an easy task), and rumbled off to the other end of the ramp.

I guess the boy thought he had done his job. What he did was insure that none of my company airplanes, some of which took on several hundred dollars of fuel for a fill up, would ever buy gas at that airport for at least the next three years that I was in charge. Discourteous treatment of one seeminly insignificant pilot had far-reaching effects because that one pilot controlled a lot of business.

The lesson is simple. Treat every customer and every transaction with courtesy and respect, not just because it's good business, but because it is the right thing to do.