Sad lesson in life no. 2352

My car has the worst timing in the world. During the most extreme and prolonged period of cold weather this country has faced in a long time, my passenger window decides to stay jammed open. So I'm rolling around town in about 5 layers of clothes with rainwater landing on my frozen cheeks, and leaving work to find an inch of snow on my passenger seat. So I take it to the garage, it takes a couple of days but they replace the faulty part and it's working fine now alhamdolillah.
There is a standard procedure that takes place when making payments for things like this, I've been doing it for years:

1. Man-at-desk shows me an invoice filled with extra charges for odd things, eg 'investigation into missing clips',
2. Man-at-desk observes my mildly scruffy appearance and unnecessarily cheerful disposition,
3. Man-at-desk looks annoyed as I query some of the work, saying that's a different dept, points in the general direction of another dept,
4. Man-at-desk says I have to make this payment,
   
5. Man-at-desk checks my signature 5 times before giving my keys, points me to my car which is sandwiched between 3 other cars and a lorry,
6. I go home and have a cup of tea.

As I expected, steps 1 to 4 took place with the predictability of a giraffe tripping over a fat hippo, but before step 5 something happened that totally took me by surprise...

I was informed by my credit card people recently that for no reason I was being given a Gold card. This was when I had finished uni, was (and still am) £X,000 in debt and had no job or income.

... the look on his face when I handed over my gold card was amazing. He seemed hypnotised by the shiny plastic, and I was talking to a different person. Man-at-desk became the most helpful person ever, and I became 'sir'. He took me to the other department and spoke to them himself, I could see them running around looking for my extra bits and they filled out my forms in the time it took for man-at-desk to bring my car to the main exit, ready for me to conveniently drive away.

Clearly, the lesson I learnt was that some people respect people who have money. I was treated with more favour than before because man-at-desk thought I was loaded. Oh dear.