Do we owe it to service providers to thank them when they try to help us in the midst of a crisis?
My students sometime rib me about responding to their emails shortly after they arrive, even if their emails arrive in the middle of the night. I joke that my goal is to try to take any excuses away that students might have to not do their work, but the reality is that I respond swiftly so I don’t forget to do so and because I often work quite late at night or obscenely early in the morning.
On July 18, around 3:30 a.m., I was working on slides to use in a talk I was scheduled to give to the members of an incoming class of students in their required summer program. I walked away from the screen for a moment to go downstairs and make a pot of coffee. When I returned, I was greeted by the dreaded BSOD (blue screen of death). I tried rebooting my computer several times with no luck, so I used my phone to send an email to my school’s IT department asking if I could bring the laptop in for a technician to look at after they opened at 7:30 a.m.
With no way to continue working on my presentation and fearing that I may have lost some material I was in the midst of creating, I turned on the television news and discovered that airports throughout the world were facing the same BSOD. It took a while to learn that the problem wasn’t unique to my relatively new computer, but had resulted from a patch that a security software company had introduced and that affected many PCs (not Macs) throughout the country.
Around 7:30 a.m., I received an email from Alex in the IT department letting me know that there wasn’t anything they could do yet, but that they were working to find a fix. Frustration ensued.
Shortly after 11 a.m., Alex emailed me to tell me they had come up with a fix if I could bring in my laptop. When I arrived to the IT help desk Alex saw me, waved me in, pulled a chair up next to his desk, and spent the next three minutes applying the fix. He had me call up some of the files I’d been working on and we discovered that nothing had been lost.
I’d lost about seven hours of time I could have been working, and I had to make an unexpected trip into the office, but when I arrived I was greeted with patience and understanding even though Alex and his team had spent the morning responding to hundreds of people facing the same issue.
Too often, the only time we deal with departments like IT is when we have a problem. Too often, our frustration spills over into impatience with them. It’s rare for us to take a moment to thank them for all they do even when we are not in crisis. I know. It’s their job do so. But it seems the right thing to extend a preemptive thanks from time to time. So this is a thanks to Alex and others in IT who seemingly invisibly keep our stuff operating so we can do our jobs. Perhaps you have an Alex worthy of thanks as well.
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, emeritus, 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) 2024 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
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