One just could not be cross with Cross, could one?

There are still some companies left that really do treat their customers like kings. Or, in my case, queens, writes Lucy Kellaway

I RATHER like the first day of proper office life after everyone has come jetting back from their Tuscan villas and Turkish yachts or come crawling out from under soggy canvas in the wet English countryside.

For me, September 1st is the proper beginning of the working year; much more so than January 1st when it is dark and everyone is grim, hungover and on a diet.

In September, children mark the fresh school year with new shoes and new pencil cases; I've always thought office workers should treat it in the same way, marking their willingness to be keener with a shiny pair of back-to-work brogues or a nice new pen.

Yet this year I don't have a new pen. I have something that gives me still more satisfaction: a new pen lid.

Not only does this lid symbolise a new start, but it also shows that, contrary to the sour, downbeat message of last week's column - in which I pointed out that many successful companies thrive on dismaying rather than delighting customers - there are some companies left that really do treat their customers like kings. Or, in my case, queens.

The pen is a Cross Century II, made of heavy ribbed silver with a soft gold nib. When I sign my name with it, I feel I am a person of great substance, one who really ought to have a signature like that of Elizabeth I, complete with that regal flourish of horizontal figures of eight.

My husband gave the pen to me two years ago. Or, rather, I stole it from him.

He had been given it as a freebie at a conference and I, not entirely pleased that he had spent an entire weekend in a grand hotel aimlessly discussing the transatlantic relationship when he could have been at home purposefully grilling fish fingers, expropriated the pen on his return. The only thing I didn't really like was the inscription, FRANCO-BRITISH COLLOQUE 2006, on the lid, but I could live with that.

A few months ago the clip on the lid snapped off and a colleague, spotting the damage, told me that, if I sent it back to Cross, they would fix it for nothing. This struck me as unlikely, but I checked the website and read the following: "The Cross guarantee extends our assurance of a lifetime of writing pleasure to every owner of a Cross writing instrument."

There were no ifs or buts, and, sweetest of all, Cross said that, if a broken pen was of sentimental value, it would try hard to mend it rather than replace it with a new one.

So I packed mine up and sent it off, announcing that I didn't feel sentimental about the inscription - though it now makes me nostalgic for that impossibly long ago age, pre-credit crunch, when companies gladly sponsored lavish events, giving delegates £160 pens just for the hell of it.

Six days later, a package arrived. Inside was my pen with a brand new silver lid, and lying beside it was the old one. Compliments of Cross, said the slip inside.

Cross, I accept your compliments, and offer you mine back in spades. My beautiful pen is more sublime than ever. Your customer service makes me glad to be alive.

Now contrast this perpetual guarantee for a lifetime of writing pleasure with the sort of treatment you get if you do your writing on a computer instead. Electronic products break the whole time and, as long as they do so beyond the year guarantee period, the manufacturers could not care less.

A while ago I bought a Dell laptop. It cost about £600 and was perfectly okay until, a year later, I got the BSoD - the blue screen of death. I called the helpline and a man far away in India told me to press this and do that - but nothing doing.

Eventually, he pronounced the hard drive dead. I protested that the machine was new but he said that was quite normal. The hard drive, he said, could go at any point; there was nothing he could do.

My third point of comparison on broken products is Apple. On this I am a world expert, at least on bust iPods. In the 3½ years since I got my first sleek music machine, I have bought nine further iPods, two for me and the rest for other members of the family.

Of these, six are now kaput and one only works in one ear. Am I angry with Apple for selling me all this expensive crud that doesn't work properly? Have I shouted at people on Apple help lines? On the contrary - I have taken it like a lamb.

In my experience, most iPods waited until around the 366th day, when the guarantee expires, to get sick. Then you take them to the gorgeous Regent Street Apple shop in London - a cathedral for the worship of sleek gadgets - and visit the Genius Bar. A handsome young nerd in a tight black T-shirt with the word Genius on his arm looks sadly at it and explains that it couldn't be fixed, or could - but only at a high price.

If I were a genius myself, I would have worked out that it might be better to junk Apple and buy a cheaper MP3 player that works.

But I'm not. I'm a bundle of suggestible sentiment and emotion and each time I visit the store I find that a newer, even sleeker one has arrived in the front of the shop just begging to be bought. What luck that the last one broke, I always think, as I happily part with another £160 for this sleek, high-tech tat.

It is hard to make sense of that when, for exactly the same money, you can have a silver and gold pen that will give you low-tech pleasure for the rest of your life.

- (Financial Times service)