Patience

We were all up at the crack of dawn rushing about to get everything that we should have done earlier this week finished this morning so Katie and I could make a late morning flight to Boston. You all know the drill; finish packing, strip the beds and get the sheets into the washer, make sure the guest room is ready for our friend who is staying with the kids this weekend, get the kids up and ready for school, breakfast, take the kids to school, and get to the airport. Everything was about where I'd expect; i.e.: we were running late and worried about missing our plane. Suddenly the magic email arrives from Delta telling us our flight has been cancelled and we are now booked on a mid-afternoon flight. So I re-scheduled the rental car, dropped the kids off at school and enjoyed a leisurely breakfast with Katie at the local diner. We did all that and I was still in the office by 9 a.m. Now, would I have liked to arrive in Boston before the evening rush hour? Absolutely. But what's the point of getting upset? I've spent the better part of my adult life as a road warrior and after years of being impatient with the delays, the cancellations, the lost reservations, I've reached a point where I realize that none of it is important. It simply doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. I've adopted an attitude that says that while none of the hotels, airlines, rental cars, restaurants, etc wanted to fail at meeting my expectations, the simple truth is that stuff happens. It's very much the same for my firm. We don't start the day expecting a server to crash or to have a spammer launch a massive email campaign........we don't plan for network interruptions or for a power strip to burn up.......these things happen because it is in the nature of the business. Technology fails from time to time; e.g: your car stops working even though you never missed a tune-up. I think what's important is not that the event occurred, it's how the failing party responds to their failure. An airline doesn't plan to lose my bag, but when they do I want to know that they are doing everything they can to track it down and get it to me. When a server crashes, I want the customer to know that we have someone focused on getting it back on line as soon as humanly possible. I want honest communication and I want an apology and I'm mostly okay with those two simple things. What I don't want is excuses and attitude. When I first arrived at this firm I had to dismiss a customer care agent who actually yelled at customers. Two warnings and then one afternoon I'm standing just outside of customer care and I hear this person yelling at one of my customers.........we walked that person out the door 30 minutes later. I don't have any patience for that type of behavior nor should our customers. But I do have patience for the realities of life and I think we would all be a bit happier if we tried to follow that guideline. Have a nice weekend folks!