Slow Down…

Distractions Leave a reply

Like most people,  work in a place where everyone else is under stress to sell and meet deadlines. Thankfully I don’t have any part of that culture but I do have to service these poor souls. It can be stressful but I try not to let it get to me.

I use to get angry when someone would email me, utterly freaked out that they needed a marketing piece that had forever changing prices on it. And said piece would be edited 7 to 8 times before being completed because gas prices in Coober Pedy went up.

Now I just get it – things change fast and a less focused mind may miss things. Example: While “kicking the tires” on a travel site that specializes in Disney vacations I just finished retrieving a price for a week at the most magical place on earth. Then I got busy with something else and when I went back to the screen, there was a yellow box just above my quote, informing me that the price I found had increased by $13 since my last search. I suspect it was a gimmick for me to buy right away, but in this day of instant reporting, I sort of doubt it.

Anyway back to my story… stressed out people…

I got an email from a woman who got one of our ads for a seminar we put on in various cities. It was for an event on the 9th, at 6pm. Her complaint was that the event was on the 6th, at 9pm… She had transposed the numbers in her head. Didn’t we know that it was way too late for her to attend and why would we even bother with such a late hour don’t we know that people have lives after the office and maybe even kids too that need their attention??

I’m fixated on the amount of time it took her to write back to complain and the wasted energy expended. If she had only read it instead of flying off the handle because she got a spam email (that she subscribed to) and not actually “seeing” what was in front of her.

My inbox is littered with emails stuffed to the tits with grammatical and spelling errors from people who type like they only have seconds left to live, by people who have utterly ignored their spell check or have turned it off in anger. Literally things like:

I need the ad by mex week

On the intranet I see can that you have…

I take complaint. Is not department my.

That last one is an exaggeration, but not that far off.

So take a moment. Breathe. Count to ten before hitting enter.

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