The Absent Uncle: Regarding impatience ...

While dealing with a company regarding electrical service to our home I came to grips with why I think I have become a bit more impatient with delays than the average customer.

I was trained by the best – to expect and give a straight answer – as quickly as possible. Resolve the problem.

Most of my career was involved with the student transportation industry. School buses. I started out as a part-time driver while going to college after my Navy days and continued to progress moving up to become a scheduler, dispatcher, manager, and ultimately, an executive with one of the largest school bus contractors in the country.

That is by no means bragging about success or achievement. I took my job, my responsibility on a daily basis very seriously. 

There was a very simple reason for it. Just take the call sometime from a kindergarten mom wondering where her little darling is. And multiply that by eight or 10. When a driver makes a mistake or gets lost – you are going to get a call. If you are the dispatcher, you are the first wave. Do your best. Pass the call up if you can’t take care of it. To the best of my memory, I never refused those calls (or sent to voicemail).

Nothing is more urgent than locating that child at that moment. Nothing. If I could do no more than take the “heat” from mom while the people on the front line did their jobs, I could explain what was going on, hold her hand over the phone, and reassure her that real people were working and caring about her child.

I took my fair share of abuse in some of those conversations. Sometimes in explaining what happened it was not a real positive reassurance about our transportation performance. But in my mind – that mom needed to know what happened, what we did about it, and what we were going to do to make sure it didn’t happen again to her child or someone else’s.

Was it pleasant? Like a root canal can be pleasant.

But owning up to bad circumstances is the best you can do. Learning from mistakes is the best you can do. Saying you are sorry is the best you can do. You do all three.

I only wish the electrical people I am dealing with could go through my forced training course.