On the Generosity of the not met*, Unexpected Surprises, and Written Responses February 18, 2006
Posted by Gary Slinger in : Uncategorized , add a commentThese days, I tend to say, and believe, that it takes a lot to surprise me. Been there, done that, and all that jazz.
Well, I came home on Thursday night to find a shipping company notification label stuck to my apartment door. That’s how we do it around here – the apartment company accepts delivery for us, and we can go and collect the package when it’s convenient. Saves having to have someone home. (Sidebar – this is great, but if anyone from Post Apartments is reading, you having office hours of 10am to 6pm is “less than customer service orientated”. Think about it – most everyone is going to have to leave for work before then, and not get home until after then. So it’s a special trip to see you, or we have to wait until the weekend. Not cool.). But back to the topic at hand.
I was working close to home yesterday, so I swung by the apartment office after lunch and collected the package. It was a package from Amazon, and there’s no great surprise there. Except that I normally have my Amazon stuff delivered to the office. I opened it up, and found it was a copy of “The World Is Flat”. Well, that’s definitely a book I’ve been meaning to read, since I heard it recommended on Manager Tools, and then listened to the author talk, on LearnOutLoud.com. So, I wondered if I’d just put the order through, chosen home by mistake, and then forgot about it. That would have been a lot of coincidences, though, wouldn’t it?
So I checked the shipping label. Sure enough, it was a gift, from someone who has been reading this site, and had seen that it was on my Amazon wish list. “Wow!” OK – that surprised me. And you know what? In all the time that I’ve been using Amazon (trust me, a far greater percentage of my income has gone to Jeff Bezos and his merry gang than I ought to be comfortable with!), I’d never realized that you could do that with a wish list. Thinking about it, it’s blindingly obvious, and of course, I could always have paid more attention to the web pages themselves, but I’d been using the wish list simply as a convenient “to do” list of books that I planned to buy myself someday. I link it from my Reading Page for my own convenience.
So, this surprised me, and it was a very nice one. And as I suspect that the person who sent the book is also going to see this post, let me now say “Thank you. I appreciate it very much”.
And that takes me nicely into my next point – I’ve just written, and mailed, a thank-you note of the old-fashioned, pen and ink variety. Now, I’m wondering, and fractionally concerned, that the book sender may have seen that I’ve received the book – the joys and wonders of package tracking, don’t you know – and wondered why I hadn’t said anything. Well, with this post, I’m cheating a little – they get to see my instant “thank you”, and then get my real one when the USPS delivers it – sometime early next week.
Doug Hampshire and I both made references to hand-written notes in recent posts of ours about job interviews, and received both positive and negative feedback about it. It occurs to me that in our modern world, with expectations of immediacy and always-on communications – there’s a Blackberry on the counter in front of me as I write this – that there’s a risk of perceived lack of courtesy or appreciation, in that gap of time between something being offered, received, or done for – whatever – and the acknowledgement and/or “thanks” making their way through the paper and mail system.
And that’s a shame, because for some things, email just isn’t enough.
This post, incidentally, was drafted in a Moleskine pocket sketchbook, with a Pilot G-2. I am somewhat biased in favor of the pen and ink way of doing things! J
* Because “stranger” isn’t appropriate, but I don’t know if “friend” is – yet.
