Personal Experience Factor

Do you or does someone you know work for a service business?
Stock up on 9v batteries today or Monday at Costco, Sams, or one of them speciality battery stores. Stick a bunch in each truck and have your crews offer to change batteries in smoke detectors for customers - notably older customers who might not [...]

Time Magazine stages a funeral for handwriting.
 

Call me out of touch. Call me an old dude. Call me an anachronist. But:
No! Nothing better than sending/receiving a handwritten note/letter/card. Nothing.
Send one handwritten thing a day.
You’ll feel better for it.
If you need raw materials (and inspiration), try my friends at Botanical Paper Works.
Now, get off my [...]

A friend came to me yesterday to express her frustrations.

Work had her down, done, and all piffy.

We broke down and isolated her great, all-consuming irritants and found them, really, to be nothing more than urinal gnats.

Guys know.  Guys who either used to live in less-than-HGTV-worthy homes when they were younger or who frequented less-than-fancy bars when they were there yesterday know.

The urinal gnats hover in the john around said receptacles.  They never land.  They never bite you and leave red, stinging welts in your nether-regions that make you want to cry.

They won’t give you the Asian flu, rickets, or ADHD.

Even a urinal gnat with the most cranky disposition on its worst day does nothing more than float there giving you something to look at while you keep your eyes front, thank you.

But, in your mind, you can allow urinal gnats to grow to prodigious horse-flies that buzz like chain-saws - disrupting your disruption with their menacing tendency to land and grab hold of something.

Same is true of my friend.

Her problems were no more than a small series of inconveniences in an otherwise pretty good job.  Most everyone loves and respects her.  She’s good at what she does.

It happens to all of us.

But if you don’t communicate … if you let the pool of problems fester in the heat and humidity of your workplace … they can buzz over the sacred dividing line and creep into my - your co-worker’s - urinal.

Or, worse, a customer’s.

Your customer doesn’t really care all that much if you’re having a bad day.  They don’t care if you’ve answered their question 273 times already today.  They’ve come to you wanting to buy from you, and there will either be a connect or disconnect between you and them that happens almost imperceptibly in the first three seconds of your time together.

So, if you have real problems, fix them away from the other patrons, please.

If you have a few small inconveniences, though, just don’t forget to flush and wash your hands of them before returning to work.

Don’t make mountains out of molehills.

Don’t make horseflies out of urinal gnats.

And, please, tip your bartenders and waitresses … provided they’ve washed their hands.