To alter a sentence by Abraham Lincoln, “You cannot please all the people all the time.”

Still, maybe we oughta try. We often have but one opportunity to make a relationship, be it romance, friendship or business. It’s not, as Woody Allen said, that “80 percent of life is showing up.” Sometimes he says “success” instead of “life.” It’s that 80 percent, or more, of life, and especially of success, is paying attention. First time, every time.

It seems, though, that one side effect of all our wonderful technology is that folks feel they don’t need to pay attention any longer. The machine will do that for them. In the case of businesses, letting the machine do it may be costing customers.

Case in point. We ran our food concession a few times at the Portland (now Maine) Flower Show, when it was held in the old Portland Company sheds on Fore Street. In 2000, we rented rooms at a hotel in South Portland for our crew. When we checked out on Sunday morning, after three nights in the hotel, we were given an extra bill for “rollaway bed, $10 per night.”

Two problems. The room had no rollaway bed. And we had not ordered a rollaway bed. The hotel’s computer had somehow logged in a rollaway bed. The desk clerk was adamant, and we had to get to the show, so we paid the $30 and headed up to Portland.

But we were pissed. A week or so later, I wrote the chain that owned the South Portland hotel to get a refund.

We heard back from the chain . . . nothing.

My wife and I had started staying at the chain’s hotels in 1966. By 2000, we were staying at its hotels five to 10 times a year.

Ten years after we didn’t hear back from the chain, I wrote again, detailing how many nights Marilyn and I had stayed at hotels not theirs. It came to about $8,000 in rentals that the chain had forfeited to snag $30 extra from us.

Knowing it had forfeited $8,000, the chain this time responded with . . . nothing.

We still haven’t heard back, and we haven’t stayed at any of the chain’s hotels since. That $8,000 in rentals the chain lost has more than tripled, as we traveled more after I retired and we began staying overnight on trips on which we used to return same night.

Our business has gone to Hampton Inn, including the one in downtown Lewiston, and almost without exception we have been well pleased. Even as hotel stays have risen from $60 or so a night to the $130 or so that we paid this month in Albany, New York. The other chain had an opportunity to keep our business, but it wasn’t paying attention.

A more local example. We used to buy bagged pine shavings as litter for the baby turkeys I farmed. About $5 a bag, and I used 500-800 bags a year. At a farm/hardware store in Madison, I once ordered 30 bags to haul away in my truck. The clerk charged 5 percent sales tax, or $1.50, extra. I told her shavings were not taxed.

I knew this because I was on the state board of directors of the Maine Farm Bureau Association, which had lobbied hard to keep the sales tax off bagged shavings. The clerk called her manager, and he refused to take the sales tax off the slip. I asked him to call the state’s bureau of taxation for a clarification, but he said he “answered to a higher authority,” whatever that meant. His computer said to tax shavings. So, I unloaded the shavings and drove away.

I have never been back to any of that company’s four stores. As a farmer, I spent between $3,000 and $5,000 a year at hardware stores and lumber yards. The local farm/hardware store had been a frequent destination for my purchases. In 20 years or so that I did not buy there, his company lost thousands of dollars in sales. But the manager, who still appears in the store’s television commercials, wasn’t paying attention.

When we were in business, we were acutely aware of how important the first impression can be. And every impression after that. We offered customers a “refund and replace” policy. A man who bought a turkey pie from us on our first week in the Skowhegan farmers market told my son, tending our stand, that he had found a tiny triangle of plastic in a turkey pie. I told Robbie to give him a new pie and his $5.95. Robbie reported that the man returned several times to our stand to buy other items.

As it happened, the next week while making turkey pies, I found a tiny triangular hole in the plastic bowl I used for mixing pie dough. Even if I had doubted the customer, here was proof. And responding to my customer may have made more business for our farm. I was glad then that I had been paying attention.

Nothing better exemplifies the value of acting on a first impression than my meeting and marrying Marilyn. My sister had told Marilyn, her best friend, that Marilyn could stay at my apartment in New York if she couldn’t find a hotel while she was preparing for a trip on a seagoing college campus (University of the Seven Seas). I worked nights, so Marilyn wouldn’t have to worry about staying at the house of a man she didn’t know.

As a night on the town in Manhattan unfolded, I called my boss and booked a sick day. Good thing. I fell in love that night, pursued Marilyn by cables to every port at which she docked and put the full-court-press on her when she returned stateside. It worked. We had been married 51 years and 11 months, to the day, when she died on June 3, 2017.

Thank God I was paying attention.

Bob Neal found some of his most rewarding time as a farmer was serving customers at farmers markets. He tried always to pay attention. To them and to their needs.

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