Sunday, February 02, 2025

Readers share their acts of kindness

In December, I shared a story of a young couple who surprised my wife and me by raking up several dozen bags of leaves from our yard when we were away. Their unexpected act of kindness touched us.

Readers responded with their own stories of kindness. Here are some of them.

A reader from Santa Rosa, California, recounted the time he and his wife were driving home and saw a young woman and baby on the shoulder of the freeway near her broken down car. They stopped and used their car service membership to call a tow truck and had it take the woman, baby and broken car to her home across town.

Another reader from Sebastopol, California, and her siblings spread kindness to honor their father. His 90th birthday “seemed like a big deal” so the siblings asked friends and family to do random acts of kindness for others in honor of their dad, and then write a brief note about their act. The siblings compiled more than 90 notes of kindness in a notebook and presented them to their father. “He was touched, but I think a little embarrassed that people, many of whom he didn't even know, had gone out of their way on his behalf.”

In 1960, a reader from North Carolina, was a college student in love. One night, the woman he had hoped to marry after graduating responded “no” when he asked over the phone if she loved him. The reader told his roommate he planned to hitchhike 200 miles to his girlfriend’s university to talk to her. His car-owning roommate responded, “let’s go,” and drove him there. He waited in his car while they broke up, and then drove them back to their own campus. The romance fizzled, but the kindness between roommates thrived.

Finally, a story arrived from a reader from Pennsylvania. Her son-in-law and his father had taken her grandson to a college basketball game. The following day the grandson was to take part in a children’s basketball clinic. During the game, the son-in-law heard a dad tell his son they couldn’t afford a clinic ticket. He spoke to the dad and bought a ticket for his son.

A day after they returned home, the son-in-law’s mother was Christmas shopping. She noticed the checkout clerk seemed stressed. When she told the clerk how great a job she was doing, the clerk teared up and said, “You have no idea how much I needed to hear that.” The woman left, headed to the bank, withdrew $100, returned to the store, and handed the money to the clerk who was gathering her things to leave. “Now I can buy groceries,” the clerk said as she hugged her. The woman called her son’s wife to let her know what happened and to tell her that her son had inspired her. Her son had never told his wife what he had done. His mother only knew because her husband overheard their son at the game.

“To me, this is the best,” the reader from Pennsylvania wrote, “when you share that kindness quietly, without recognition – just purely to be kind.”

Whether it’s quiet kindness or a louder variation, offering when possible to help others who might be in need remains the right thing to do. Continue to share your stories of kindness offered and I will continue to try to share them.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Sunday, January 26, 2025

Don’t believe everything you read on the internet

Should you correct a colleague or friend who spreads misinformation?

Ten years ago, I agreed to participate at a student journalism conference on a panel with other writers, editors and journalists. I knew several who were going to be on the panel. Each of us arrived in the early evening before the conference began and we spent some time catching up.

As we were all chatting, the organizer of the event joined us. She laid out what we should expect for the next couple of days. When she told the group I would be delivering the keynote address to all attendees the following day, it took me by surprise. I hadn’t prepared anything since I had no recollection of being asked to do this.

Nevertheless, I agreed to give it a go. I returned to my hotel room, took out my laptop, wrote up some notes, and prepared a few PowerPoint slides. The talk was supposed to be about the state of journalism ethics so I drew from past columns and perused a few books on ethics that I had referred to in the past in the column, while teaching or when giving a talk.

The next day went fine, until I put up one of the slides for the group, which was a quotation attributed to the German writer Goethe. I had lifted the quote from the opening of a chapter in a book on ethics an old colleague had recently published. One of the professors in attendance pointed out that he was pretty sure Goethe never wrote the words I posted and that the quotation didn’t sound at all like him. He was curious if I knew the source. Aside from it being featured in a friend’s book, I did not know the source. But I told him I would check.

When I pointed it out to my writer friend, she admitted that she didn’t know the source either but had seen the quote someplace and liked it so she used it. Like me, neither she nor her editor nor anyone else associated with the book had verified those words were actually Goethe’s. After the talk, I let the professor know and also asked the organizer to let the attendees know about my mistake.

Typically, I try to be vigilant about checking original sources for quotes that I see attributed to others to verify the person credited actually deserves the credit. This time I didn’t. I should have.

Now, when a friend or colleague posts a quotation on social media that I know to be incorrect, I take the time to point out to them that they might want to check their source. Usually, I text them or private message them. Most often they check the quote and take it down when it turns out to be wrong. Only once did someone, a K-12 educator, respond by letting me know he didn’t care since he liked the quote anyway.

There’s an old meme with a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.” While Lincoln obviously never said that, the message is strong. When we find quotations we like on the internet, rather than repost them right away, the right thing is to check to make sure the attribution is correct. Just as the internet is full of misattributed quotations, it’s also full of source material that should make checking our facts relatively simple.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Sunday, January 19, 2025

If you receive an item you didn’t order, what do you do?

What’s the right thing to do when you get something you haven’t ordered from Amazon.com?

A few weeks before Christmas, a reader we’re calling Jane received an email alert that a package she had ordered from Amazon had arrived. A photo accompanying the package showed her goods resting safely on her front stoop. Jane was relieved that a small gift she had ordered for her husband had arrived in time for her to wrap it, place it under their tree, and have it waiting for him on Christmas morning.

The gift was a small scratch-off card that allowed users to scratch off specific places they had visited. Jane had ordered one 5-by-7 card and had paid $15.99 for it. But when Jane opened the package, she found that Amazon had shipped her 30 shrink-wrapped cards instead of one. Jane re-checked her original order and bill to make sure she hadn’t ordered more than one card. She hadn’t, and she had no intention of keeping items she hadn’t ordered or paid for.

Jane noticed on the Amazon page that the item was made by a small business that partnered with Amazon. The website encouraged prospective buyers to support these small businesses. Jane was concerned that the owners of the small business that made the cards would lose potential sales on 29 cards that were errantly sent to Jane.

Her past experience with Amazon led her to believe that finding an actual human being to deal with rather than a series of auto-responses to calls or emails could prove challenging. Rather than contact Amazon, Jane looked up the customer service email from the card company’s website. She wrote the company a note explaining what happened. While she had figured that a response from them would be swift, she didn’t anticipate just how swift. Within hours she heard from the company, thanking her for her honesty and her offer to return the items if they told her how. The company told her to keep five of the cards and to provide them with her Venmo account information so they could send her $8 for any return shipping costs.

Jane was touched by the offer. She returned 25 of the cards, gave one to her husband, three to a friend who traveled with her family to similar places, and kept one for herself. She paid for her own postage. Once the company received the cards, they thanked her again for her honesty.

When you receive something you didn’t order or are undercharged for something you’ve purchased, the right thing is to try to correct that wrong. There’s no need to have that correction end up costing you more than the item itself, but Jane figured the $8 was more than offset by the company’s offer to keep four cards, even though she hadn’t intended to spend money on them.

Some readers may argue that Jane should have contacted Amazon directly rather than taking action that might better ensure the small business wouldn’t be out of pocket for the errant shipment. Others might point out that that small business was in a better position to do whatever might be necessary to make good with its partner Amazon. Jane’s actions, however, suggest there are still people who will to try to do the right thing when no one is looking.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Sunday, January 12, 2025

Looking back at another year of doing The Right Thing

A year ago, at the end of 2023, after looking at the analytics for the website where The Right Thing weekly column gets posted after it has run in publications that carry it, it was clear that readers were most drawn to columns that touched on leaving jobs gracefully, maintaining privacy after death, showing gratitude in tough times and learning how to support children without doing their work for them.

In 2024, the top five columns focused on being an engaged citizen, companies that prop up bad behavior in advertisements, learning to lose gracefully, not allowing pretension to get in the way of our message and whether companies are obligated to honor commitments even if they were made in jest.

The fifth-most viewed column, “Fly me to the moon,” ran in late October. I wrote it shortly after a billionaire financed Elon Musk’s Polaris Dawn spaceflight for roughly $200 million. I reminisced about signing up for a “First Moon Flight Club” sponsored by Pan American Airways in the late 1960s. Pan Am is long gone as a company, but I argued that even if this was a marketing gimmick, if the company were still around and actually offering trips to the moon, it would do well to see if those who signed up were interested. Granted, few of us would be able to foot the bill. Nevertheless, it would be nice to be asked.

An August column, “Humor can be a funny thing,” was written in response to a series of television advertisements run by a national mattress company. The ads featured people behaving badly being asked how they slept at night. The response was always that they slept on one of the company’s mattresses. That the ads seemed to suggest that you too could behave badly if only you used our product struck me as an odd marketing strategy.

Using a line from Steely Dan about wanting a name when we lose, an October column, “How we lose can define us,” concluded that how we behave when we lose can go a long way toward sending a message about our character.

In September, I wrote in “Do too many signature credentials smack of pretension?” about how those who use too many initials and affiliations in their email signatures might come off as trying too hard to appear more impressive than they need to. It was best, I argued, not to let such things risk getting in the way of the message you were trying to convey.

Finally, by far the most viewed Right Thing column of the year was early November’s “Don’t get angry. Get to work.” I argued in the column that anger in response to some effort not going the way we wanted too often sapped our energy and distracted us from continuing to focus on other ways to achieve our goals. “If we were truly concerned about a cause, that cause doesn’t disappear because we didn’t get our way,” I wrote. “Rather than stew in anger or regret, the right thing seems to be to double down on any efforts to engage in whatever work is needed to set things straight.”

Thank you for continuing to email your questions, stories and reactions to The Right Thing column. May your years continue to be full of doing the right thing while surrounded by those who choose to do the same.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Sunday, January 05, 2025

If you stain a pair of jeans before you check out, must you buy them?

How honest should you be when returning product to store shelves?

A reader we’re calling Davis is particular about the type of denim jeans he wears, both brand and style. He keeps a lookout when they become available at the membership warehouse club to which he belongs since the price is much better than elsewhere.

A challenge Davis has is that the size jeans he wears, waist and inside leg length, is rarely as available as other sizes. He figures that he either has unusual measurements or one of the most common measurements. Whatever the reason, Davis tries to grab a pair of his favorite jeans whenever he finds them at a good price. Typically, by the time this happens the jeans he does own either have holes in the knees or splattered paint or grease embedded in the denim.

But on a recent trip to his warehouse club, large stacks of Davis’ favorite jeans were piled up on counters in the center of the store. Davis parked his shopping cart at the end of the counter, ransacked his way through the hundreds of pairs of jeans to see if they had his size. He grabbed the two pair of jeans in his size that were in the denim piles.

Pleased with his find, Davis went about his shopping. He picked up a rotisserie chicken, a bag of coffee beans, some navel oranges, and a container of strawberries, among other things. When he got to the line queued up for the cash registers, Davis noticed that the strawberries had been sitting on top of the jeans and had left what looked to be a stain on them.

Now, Davis was faced with a decision. Should he buy the jeans and hope to get the stain out? Should he pull out of line and go back to toss the jeans onto the pile where he found them? Or should he go to the customer service counter at the front of the store and hand the jeans over to them explaining what happened?

Two of these options could have been a right thing to do. Davis could have purchased the jeans and hoped for the best in removing the stain. Or he could have handed the jeans over to the customer service desk or to the cashier at the cash register and explained what happened. Returning them with a stain to the pile of goods may have been the quickest remedy, but that chanced that an unsuspecting customer might purchase them without noticing the strawberry blemish.

If Davis didn’t want to deal with getting the stain out of the jeans, then the right thing would have been to turn them over to someone at the store who could make the decision about what to do with them. Davis shouldn’t feel guilty if he chose not to buy the jeans even though he was the one who wasn’t careful about where the strawberries were placed in his cart. He should be no more responsible for this error of judgment than he would be had he knocked over a jar of olives. Next time the jeans become available, however, Davis would be wise to be more careful about his cart produce placement.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.