uh, really?
i just saw a commercial for www.alpacainfo.com. a lady was talking about it as if she had just saved the world. like the next big thing is to start your own alpaca farm and be rich and happy and fulfilled.
maybe i’m not one to judge what people think, but that just sounds crazy.
the roast of bob saget
so i just watched the roast of bob saget, and i have to say, cloris leachman is friggin HYSTERICAL. i wish she was my grandmother.
if you’ve never watched a comedy central roast, they’re not exactly clean, but they ARE hysterical. click the roast link above and watch cloris. oh. my. gosh. SOOO funny!
dick and jane
i’m currently watching “fun with dick and jane”, the movie starring jim carrey and tea leoni and alec baldwin. you know, the one “based on” the scandal of enron and how all these people lost their jobs, their retirement, their pensions, the whole deal?
jim carrey does a great job of making a tragic situation comedic, but in light of recent economic happenings, i watch it in a different light than i did when the movie first came out 3 years ago. realistically, people that i know have lost their jobs. people in my church community are trying to feed a family and pay a mortgage based on whatever burger king-type job they could find.
and now, people at my company are facing the same potential fate. over at the starbucks gossip website, partners have communicated their fears on paying their bills when their store closes, because many stores that are closing do not have another one close by for them to transfer to. so the combination of the 2 just has me thinking: what the hell would i do if my husband or i ever lost our jobs? it’s happened before, but at least we still had ONE income. what would we do if we were a one income family, or if we both lost our jobs?
- sell the house or rent it out and move in with another family or into a small apartment?
- move back with the parents? (oh the horrors!)
we already own both of our old, beater cars. and we’re thrifty people, so unlike dick and jane, we don’t have much we could sell. we live a frugal life as it is. we’ve read through dave ramsey’s book “total money makeover“, which we both would highly recommend. it makes me feel like perhaps i’m less scared than i could be, but then again, we’ve never been in that boat, and i can hardly imagine how difficult it really is! hopefully, unlike dick and jane, we would have friends and a community to turn to to help us out.
anyone experience this hardship before? what do you do? who do you turn to?
i’m so over it…
ever have those days where you just wanted to throw in the towel with just about everything?
who am i kidding? we’ve all had those days.
i’ve been working my ass off at my job with literally nothing to show for it. i’m on a career treadmill. the economy sucks, so business sucks, which makes me and my fellow employees look like we suck, and the suck-fest pulls down morale, which only leads to people not giving a shit (myself included at times), and the cycle gets worse. overall, i’m a very positive person. but over the past 6 months or so, that has been waning, seeing as how everything i do seems to fail, or if it succeeds, it doesn’t succeed “enough”.
at my previous job, one of my biggest peeves was that my boss’s boss, who wanted to promote me, could never just give me a compliment and be done with it. i was one of the best salespeople in his area, and i would close a deal, underneath what the “target” was, and he would ask why i didn’t make my target. now i should explain that i was in lending. so let’s say my “target” was $150k in loans, and this particular time i did $130k. now to me, that $130k is a hellalot better than ZERO. sure, i didn’t make the target. but i was proud of myself for not being at ZERO. i worked my ass off for that $130k. can you just say “great job” and get on with your life? why does upper management have to make everyone’s life miserable? there’s an old expression that goes something like, “shoot for the moon and you’ll land among the stars”. how optimistic!
every company i’ve ever had the “pleasure” of working with sets goals that are normally out of the realm of realistic. but i get it – they want you to push yourself, and to strive every month or quarter or what have you to do better and better. so why, when you can prove that you’ve done the work, you’ve tried every avenue, etc do they contend that you’re just not doing your job well enough if you don’t hit every goal?
now i suppose if the fact i was having this issue was isolated there might be an argument there. but most of the locations in our area are having the same issue. if they aren’t, i would say that they are the exception to the rule, and are doing well despite a shitty economy. no one wants to admit that things aren’t as easy as they used to be, but for the love of all things, accept and realize that this is the way things are. i can’t hold a gun to someone’s head and sell them a product or service that they quite simply do not want or can’t afford b/c of the way things are right now. get a clue.
whew. rant done. for now. anyone else experiencing the same crap?
gas or Starbucks?
There’s not a person alive not feeling the pinch of effing ridiculous gas prices. The fine folks at ecofriendlydriver.com posted about how people are cutting back on their daily latte in order to afford gas for their vehicle. (I’ll post the post at the bottom of this post. How very strange that last sentence looks.)
One person commented how one of the top 10 ways to save money on every top 10 list made, be it by Suze Orman or Dave Ramsey or the-financial-advisor-of-your-choice, is to cut out your daily trips to Starbucks. Which is all fine and good, but I know several people who pay their bills because people make daily trips to Starbucks, and they are also feeling the pinch from everyone else feeling the pinch. Less people are coming, which means less sales, so they’re losing hours, losing tips, and the pressure increases. Not many people think about them – not that I’m saying peopel should go into debt to maintain their daily latte so my friends get more hours, but just a thought to remember the “little people” behind the counter.
So what kinds of things have you done to accomodate the pinch? We’ve:
- cut out eating out as often (but when we do we’re tipping more, b/c we figure, like our Starbucks friends, those waiters are feeling the pinch of people cutting back)
- aren’t going to movies, bowling, putt-putt golfing, etc and instead opting for watching TV or playing video games or board games at home (which requires no use of gas…). We’re renting movies, and to save even more gas money, doing it through iTunes (boy are those Apple people brilliant).
- i will spend 5 hours shopping and running errands so I only have to make one trip. And no more frivolous spending.
What kinds of things are you doing?
If I could find the actual Kelley Blue Book article I’d give it to you, but alas – I cannot. Here’s the post from ecofriendlydriver.
Gas Prices Killing Starbucks, McDonald’s
I just thought this was an interesting thing to have in a survey. :p Kelley Blue Book performed some market research in regard to new car buyers’ other spending habits as gas prices have risen.
60% say they are eating out less often*
44% are taking fewer vacations
28% are buying fewer or have stopped buying any DVDs and CDs**
28% have stopped going to Starbucks, with another 21% saying they’ve cut back
wow. are you kidding?
Ohio man stalls long enough to get new outhouse
Mon Jun 9, 5:16 PM ET
An ailing, retired farmer who refused to give up his outhouse after authorities declared it to be a public nuisance finally got a new one.
Elbert “Lew” Preston, 79, stood his ground long enough for a nonprofit group to come to his aid and build him a sturdy new outhouse with a waste tank underneath.
“There she is,” Preston said as he showed off the new outbuilding. “She’s a lifesaver.”
The wooden outhouse, complete with a crescent moon on its door, replaces a 1960s-built version that had run afoul of public health officials in Clermont County, east of Cincinnati. While the old one was over a hole in the ground, this one sits atop a concrete base and a 1,000-gallon tank.
“It’s too nice and complicated to be an outhouse,” Preston said. “I call it a privy.”
Preston, a former trustee for Washington Township, challenged the board of health for months before seeking help from People Working Cooperatively, a nonprofit that has done thousands of projects for low-income, elderly and disabled residents in southern Ohio and northern Kentucky.
Past jobs have included replacing roofs and building wheelchair ramps, but this was its first outhouse.
Preston lives near a busy shopping area and has 175 acres of potentially lucrative real estate but didn’t want to go to the expense and complications of installing a septic system.
Preston, who is slowed by diabetes and has colon problems and pacemaker, said he never saw the need to replace the old outhouse — which once was picked up and carried into his garden by a tornado without major damage.
He said he has used an outside toilet since settling in Washington Township 40 years ago and likes the privacy of a privy.
“When you’re in a house, sounds carry,” Preston said. “Everybody knows your business.”
A really great article
I’ve spent the majority of my life working in customer service in one capacity or another. I came across this article today, and thought it was really smart. So I thought I’d share it.
When the customer isn’t right – for your business
by: Alexander Kjerulf
One woman who frequently flew on Southwest, was constantly disappointed with every aspect of the company’s operation. In fact, she became known as the “Pen Pal” because after every flight she wrote in with a complaint.
She didn’t like the fact that the company didn’t assign seats; she didn’t like the absence of a first-class section; she didn’t like not having a meal in flight; she didn’t like Southwest’s boarding procedure; she didn’t like the flight attendants’ sporty uniforms and the casual atmosphere.
Her last letter, reciting a litany of complaints, momentarily stumped Southwest’s customer relations people. They bumped it up to Herb’s [Kelleher, CEO of Southwest] desk, with a note: ‘This one’s yours.’
In sixty seconds, Kelleher wrote back and said, ‘Dear Mrs. Crabapple, We will miss you. Love, Herb.’”
The phrase “The customer is always right” was originally coined by Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridge’s department store in London in 1909, and is typically used by businesses to:
1. Convince customers that they will get good service at this company
2. Convince employees to give customers good service
Fortunately more and more businesses are abandoning this maxim – ironically because it leads to bad customer service.
Here are the top five reasons why “The customer is always right” is wrong.
1: It makes employees unhappy
Gordon Bethune is a brash Texan (as is Herb Kelleher, coincidentally) who is best known for turning Continental Airlines around “From Worst to First,” a story told in his book of the same title from 1998. He wanted to make sure that both customers and employees liked the way Continental treated them, so he made it very clear that the maxim “the customer is always right” didn’t hold sway at Continental.
In conflicts between employees and unruly customers he would consistently side with his people. Here’s how he puts it:
When we run into customers that we can’t reel back in, our loyalty is with our employees. They have to put up with this stuff every day. Just because you buy a ticket does not give you the right to abuse our employees . . .
We run more than 3 million people through our books every month. One or two of those people are going to be unreasonable, demanding jerks. When it’s a choice between supporting your employees, who work with you every day and make your product what it is, or some irate jerk who demands a free ticket to Paris because you ran out of peanuts, whose side are you going to be on?
You can’t treat your employees like serfs. You have to value them . . . If they think that you won’t support them when a customer is out of line, even the smallest problem can cause resentment.
So Bethune trusts his people over unreasonable customers. What I like about this attitude is that it balances employees and customers, where the “always right” maxim squarely favors the customer – which is not a good idea, because, as Bethune says, it causes resentment among employees.
Of course there are plenty of examples of bad employees giving lousy customer service. But trying to solve this by declaring the customer “always right” is counter-productive.
2: It gives abrasive customers an unfair advantage
Using the slogan “The customer is always right” abusive customers can demand just about anything – they’re right by definition, aren’t they? This makes the employees’ job that much harder, when trying to rein them in.
Also, it means that abusive people get better treatment and conditions than nice people. That always seemed wrong to me, and it makes much more sense to be nice to the nice customers to keep them coming back.
3: Some customers are bad for business
Most businesses think that “the more customers the better”. But some customers are quite simply bad for business.
Danish IT service provider ServiceGruppen proudly tell this story:
One of our service technicians arrived at a customer’s site for a maintenance task, and to his great shock was treated very rudely by the customer.
When he’d finished the task and returned to the office, he told management about his experience. They promptly cancelled the customer’s contract.
Just like Kelleher dismissed the irate lady who kept complaining (but somehow also kept flying on Southwest), ServiceGruppen fired a bad customer. Note that it was not even a matter of a financial calculation – not a question of whether either company would make or lose money on that customer in the long run. It was a simple matter of respect and dignity and of treating their employees right.
4: It results in worse customer service
Rosenbluth International, a corporate travel agency, took it even further. CEO Hal Rosenbluth wrote an excellent book about their approach called Put The Customer Second – Put your people first and watch’em kick butt.
Rosenbluth argues that when you put the employees first, they put the customers first. Put employees first, and they will be happy at work. Employees who are happy at work give better customer service because:
* They care more about other people, including customers
* They have more energy
* They are happy, meaning they are more fun to talk to and interact with
* They are more motivated
On the other hand, when the company and management consistently side with customers instead of with employees, it sends a clear message that:
* Employees are not valued
* That treating employees fairly is not important
* That employees have no right to respect from customers
* That employees have to put up with everything from customers
When this attitude prevails, employees stop caring about service. At that point, real good service is almost impossible – the best customers can hope for is fake good service. You know the kind I mean: corteous on the surface only.
5: Some customers are just plain wrong
Herb Kelleher agrees, as this passage From Nuts! the excellent book about Southwest Airlines shows:
Herb Kelleher […] makes it clear that his employees come first — even if it means dismissing customers. But aren’t customers always right? “No, they are not,” Kelleher snaps. “And I think that’s one of the biggest betrayals of employees a boss can possibly commit. The customer is sometimes wrong. We don’t carry those sorts of customers. We write to them and say, ‘Fly somebody else. Don’t abuse our people.’”
If you still think that the customer is always right, read this story from Bethune’s book “From Worst to First”:
A Continental flight attendant once was offended by a passenger’s child wearing a hat with Nazi and KKK emblems on it. It was pretty offensive stuff, so the attendant went to the kid’s father and asked him to put away the hat. “No,” the guy said. “My kid can wear what he wants, and I don’t care who likes it.”
The flight attendant went into the cockpit and got the first officer, who explained to the passenger the FAA regulation that makes it a crime to interfere with the duties of a crew member. The hat was causing other passengers and the crew discomfort, and that interfered with the flight attendant’s duties. The guy better put away the hat.
He did, but he didn’t like it. He wrote many nasty letters. We made every effort to explain our policy and the federal air regulations, but he wasn’t hearing it. He even showed up in our executive suite to discuss the matter with me. I let him sit out there. I didn’t want to see him and I didn’t want to listen to him. He bought a ticket on our airplane, and that means we’ll take him where he wants to go. But if he’s going to be rude and offensive, he’s welcome to fly another airline.
The fact is that some customers are just plain wrong, that businesses are better of without them, and that managers siding with unreasonable customers over employees is a very bad idea, that results in worse customer service.
So put your people first. And watch them put the customers first.
Work Schmurk
A few years ago my husband was in his first full time “career” job after college. Long story short, they screwed him over and laid him off. It was a painful experience.
We’ve spent the past few years trying to heal from our anger at those people, anger at God for allowing us to go through it, from feeling betrayed, and trying to move on with our lives. We took jobs that weren’t “dream jobs”, but that we thought would be good to help us heal a move on. And it has been. We work for a great organization that is very open to all kinds of people (which in and of itself has been healing to meet such a diverse group of people), an organization with high ethics and standards, and that we take a lot of pride in working at. Both of us could see ourselves here for a long time.
Yet for some reason, we’re both open to moving on. Somehow, within the past several months, the place that we’ve come to as a result of years of healing is now being hindered by the very jobs that helped to bring the healing. Is that weird? Does it make sense? We’re now realizing that what we’ve been doing has been perfect for the time we’ve been doing it, but the things that we want to do with the next several years of our life – well, work interferes with it. Be it scheduling, the physicality of it, logistics, etc. The things we care about – our church community, each other, friends and family, and eventually our own family – are all things we have to say “no” to, or at least put off more than we should, in order to “do our job”.
I was talking to someone at my church about this tonight, and he said something simple and profound, something about a time in life where you realize work has to revolve around your life, not your life around your work.
Wow. Afterwards, I thought, “yeah. so?” because it DID seem so simple. And the more I thought of it the more I got it. As we get older, our priorities shift, our goals change – or perhaps they don’t change so much as mold into something different than we thought they were. When we were in our 20s, it was all about being happy at work, making money, finding out who we were. We didn’t care that our scheduling was, essentially, shit, because we still saw each other at home, at least enough (at least we thought that then). We moved to a different city a few years ago after he got laid off and didn’t have many friends so we didn’t realize we weren’t seeing them. We were church-hopping so we didn’t have community. And we were far from being ready to have kids.
All that has changed in the past year. We chose a community to live in, bought a house, have decided what church community to invest in, have made several friends, have a small group, and are wanting kids. We’re in a VERY different place than a few years ago.
Several years ago I tried my hand at an in-home based direct sales business (what woman HASN’T tried some sort of ‘direct-marketing’ job?) I was actually quite good at it, but was at my height when 9/11 hit, and being young, new, and having a young and new team it just fizzled out. One thing I respected about them as a company was that they taught their consultants: “God first, family second, career third”. As a woman in my early 20s I thought, “that’s nice” at the time, but didn’t realize WHY that philosophy was so important. Now I do. Because now, if it means I can see my husband, friends and family more, volunteer at organizations I care about more, then it doesn’t matter to me as much what I do with a “measly” 40 hours of my time a week.
So a lot of this may seem like rambling of learnings without an end point, and if so, that’s okay. Any of you ever gone through this? Any thoughts? Advice?
for the love of our pets
oprah. God love her.
so last week oprah sent lisa ling undercover to do a story on puppy mills. i will admit, i DVR oprah. i figure those days where there’s nothing on then i’ll have a couple episodes to watch, and chances are, whatever her show is about is worth watching, unless she’s discussing a book i’m not reading, some celebrity i don’t care about, or something like that. probably 4 days out of 5 days i think it’d be worth watching.
now, as of yet, i’m not a dog owner. we haven’t graduated to the responsibility of kids or dogs. (we’ve actually heard kids are easier than dogs – ha!) we do have cats, and i’ve always been someone who cares incredibly for animals. that whole, ‘they have no voice so we should be their’s’ type of thing.
so i was STUNNED, actually that’s quite an understatement, to find out what goes on in these mills. i mean, first of all, the very phrase “puppy mills” just reeks of cruelty and degradation. but to see the hidden camera shots was heart-wrenching. i used to drag my husband into pet shops in the mall, and i’d goggle over the cute little animals there and want to take them all home. now knowing what environment they come from, how their mom was treated, and what kind of environment their first 6-8 weeks is, i’m disgusted. plain and simple.
something the guy on there (my apologies for not remembering his name – he’s the one who rented out the billboard to get her attention and everything) said that i had never known before, was how the people who run puppy mills view dogs. most of the puppy mills are located in pennsylvania and ohio, which hits pretty close to home, in largely amish communities who view the dogs as agriculture or livestock, as most would consider pigs or cows. they are people who are shocked that people allow their dogs to run around in their home.
anyhow, i was glad that oprah did a show on puppy mills, and opened peoples’ eyes to what goes on inside.
for more info, visit:
www.hsus.org/pets/issues_affecting_our_pets/get_the_facts_on_puppy_mills
