frustration

Alexander, the Not So Great

~ Paul Phillips ~ Leave a comment

If my name had been Alexander, it would have made sense.  The morning at my junior high school hadn’t started out well, what with being sent to Mr. Chapa’s office for running in the hall.  Okay, so it actually started before that, when I missed the bus and my mom got me to school late.  After picking up my books from my locker, I was running to math class, but one of the teachers stopped me and sent me to the Assistant Principal.  “Paul, this is the third time this semester I’ve seen you in here,” he reminded me sternly.  “The next time, you’ll be getting swats.  For now, two afternoons of detention, but I don’t want to see you in here again!”  I assured him he wouldn’t, knowing that he would, and went to math class, only to have Debbie Gordon write on my shirt (in ink!) as she sat behind me.  What a day!  And my name wasn’t even Alexander!

But, like the protagonist of that popular children’s book “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day”, it really was to be, well…just that.  After math, I stumbled through a few more classes which I hated.  Nothing bad really happened there, but never fear, that would change.  I headed for the one class I loved – Band.  Our band director, Mr. Olson, remains to this day, one of my favorite teachers.  He just had a knack for making you feel special, complimenting you when you got a difficult passage right, exulting with you when you had practiced for hours to be able to challenge the guy ahead of you in the seating arrangement and bested him.  My guess is that he commiserated with the loser in much the same way, to make him feel better, encouraging him to work harder the next time.  Band was the one place where this young nerd felt at ease and free to express himself.

On this day, that expression of myself was to be a big problem.  As Mr. Olson explained a fingering pattern to the flutes, Randy, who sat next to me in the horn section, and I started poking at each other.  All of the sudden, my horn…really the school’s horn, slipped off of my lap and to the floor with a crash.  The discussion with the flutes ceased instantaneously, all eyes focusing on me, and my face turned beet red.  An angry Mr. Olson (yeah, he could do angry too) snapped out a question which I didn’t understand.  I thought he said, “Did you get it?”, perhaps wondering if I had caught the horn before it was damaged.  I wasn’t sure, but answered timorously, “Yes.”  He grew even angrier, nearly shouting at me as he told me to put the horn away and get one of the beginner’s single horns to play.  I was mortified, but did as I was told, returning to my seat with the inferior instrument, to finish the period.  Afterward, the other guys told me that he had inquired if I dented the horn, which explained his reaction.  I hadn’t, but it made no difference by that time.

I stumbled through the rest of the day, but it wasn’t finished with me yet.  I had only gotten through the terrible, the horrible, and the no good parts so far.  The very bad was yet to come, although in retrospect, it was actually pretty funny.  That day, I couldn’t laugh about it at all.  I was preparing for All Region tryouts, so I had a private lesson scheduled with Mr. Olson after school.  While I waited my turn for a lesson, I went to warm up in the prop room on the stage, which was just behind the band room.  You went out through a door, up a short flight of steps to the stage, and the door to the room was on the right.  I closed the door, sat down, and began to play a scale.  It was a disaster.  The fingerings were all different and the bore of the horn was smaller, so it sounded bad, and I just couldn’t play anything right.  The time approached for me to meet with Mr. Olson, so I got up to leave the room, but found that the door was jammed!  It was completely stuck shut, and…it opened inward.  No amount of jerking the door knob would budge it.  I shouted; I pounded on the door, but there was no one in the gymnasium, and the other door into the band room was a solid slab of wood, so even shouting didn’t carry to anyone there.  Finally, as my panic subsided, I looked around for something, anything to help me; soon finding a long wooden pole lying on the floor.  Like many classroom doors in those days, there were slats in the lower half of the door, and one of them was broken out.  I stuck the pole out the slot, shoving it to the left and down the stairs, banging it again and again on the door to the band room.  Eventually, someone heard the racket and came up, shoving on the door from the outside as I pulled with all my might on the knob.

Free from that prison at last, I headed for my lesson; ten minutes late.  Once again, Mr Olson wasn’t happy.  By this point, he wasn’t even prepared to listen to my explanation, but as we started the lesson, he softened.  As I gamely struggled to play the notes that had come clearly and effortlessly on the good horn, he made a decision.  “If you hadn’t come to this lesson today, Paul, I was going to make you keep this horn all year.  I’m going to give you another chance.  Don’t make me regret it.”  Unlike the promise to the assistant principal earlier in the day, the promise I made to him was one I knew I could keep.  I’ve never asked him, but I don’t think he ever had a reason to be sorry.

Terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days happen.  Sometimes, when they come, I want to go home and wait for tomorrow from the safety of my bedroom.  I’m fairly certain that won’t work.  To get to tomorrow, hopefully a better day, you have to go through today.  The events which are put in our way are there for a purpose, sometimes to help us grow, perhaps to be an example to someone else who is watching.  How we deal with them speaks volumes about our character and our resolve to be who we say we are.

It is, however, a very good thing that those days don’t come every day.  And, when they do come, it helps to know that the bell is going to ring at the end of the school day.  Light at the end of the tunnel brings new hope…unless, of course, it turns out to be an oncoming train…

“To the victor belong the spoils.”
(William L. Marcy~New York Senator & Governor~1786-1857)

“‘I daren’t come and drink,’ said Jill. ‘Then you will die of thirst,’ said the Lion.  ‘Oh dear!’ said Jill, coming another step nearer. ‘I suppose I must go and look for another stream then.’‘There is no other stream,’ said the Lion.”
(C.S. Lewis~from The Silver Chair in The Chronicles of Narnia)

The print’s just fine, thanks!

~ Paul Phillips ~ Leave a comment

“I don’t read fine print,” were the words I read in the email, the second one from this customer that day.  It was the Monday after Thanksgiving and it seemed that it was going to be one of those Mondays.  I had arrived just before 9:00 a.m. to get the coffee made and pull the orders for the day, only to find an email from an irate customer waiting.  It seems that she had placed an order on Tuesday before Thanksgiving, requesting that the package be shipped to her by 3-day delivery.  Any idiot could count on their fingers and cipher out that three days from Tuesday would be Friday.  Yet, her package wasn’t scheduled to be delivered until Tuesday.  How is that possible?  “PLEASE REFUND MY MONEY!”, screamed the last line in the missive.

I politely replied to her email and after offering a solution which should have been acceptable, suggested that it might have been helpful, had she read the “policy page” as instructed, before selecting expedited shipping for her order.  The policy for the shipping company explained that there would be no deliveries on Thanksgiving or the Friday after, and those days would not count in the days-in-transit count.  It all made perfect sense to me, but the reply you see above was all that was forthcoming.  Don’t read fine print!?  How can you not read the fine print?  Life is precarious enough without encouraging problems.  Surely, there are no ignorant thrill-seekers left in this world who don’t read all the instructions before pushing the “make payment” key.  Don’t they know the tangled mess they make of the orderly systems we have in place to keep the wheels of commerce moving?  Fine print is the lubricant of the whole enterprise!  

Truth be told, the print wasn’t any smaller than that on the rest of the page, but let’s not argue about semantics.  She couldn’t be bothered.  And, it was obvious that the fault lay with us, not with her.  A phone conversation with her later in the day made clear that we were not going to ameliorate the problem to her satisfaction any time in this century.  We offered a full refund, including the purchase price of the product, as well as giving her the item to keep, but still she could not be mollified.  At wit’s end, I finally suggested that possibly we were not the organization with which she should be shopping for her music, since we obviously weren’t capable of performing up to her standards.  As you might imagine, my last suggestion wasn’t made without a fair amount of frustration (and maybe a little sarcasm) on my part, nor was it met with quiescence on her part.  Regardless, we went our separate ways, each certain of the merit of our own position, and each not having achieved our goal.

I hate unfinished business.  I want every customer to feel that she or he has gotten everything they have paid for and then some.  I also want everybody to like me, although by now, I’m convinced that this goal is impossible to meet.  Sometimes, our objectives are unattainable, our sights set just too high.  But still, it’s very difficult for me not to put this one in the loss column, hard not to say that I failed.  I look at the facts and know that I did all I could, but a bad result has to be tallied somehow, so I call it a loss.  Fortunately, as I count them up, the win column is still weighted heavily, but I wish that all of the occurrences which have made their mark in the loss column could be completely erased. 

“Hey, Paul!  This is John in Atlanta.  You know, I got a bad CD last week.”  The cheerful voice belies the words.  John isn’t angry, doesn’t want an apology.  He knows us by now and he’s confident that we’ll get a good product sent right out to him.  As a matter of fact, he wants to order five other items while he’s got me on the phone.  “You guys always treat me right.  Fast delivery and always there to help me when I need it.  Can’t ask for better than that!”  Wouldn’t it be nice if I could get him to call the earlier customer and help her to see what a nice guy I really am?  Oh well, that’s not the way it works, but man, do I appreciate customers who are such an encouragement!

It would be easy to get discouraged about the failures, but we constantly receive reassurance from customers.  A note here about the great service, a phone call there about how fast the product arrived, a new customer who tells me they contacted us because they received a glowing endorsement from a friend; all of these help to give the impetus to keep doing what we do.  The funny thing is, the bad experiences also help us to do that.  We keep plugging away, because we are convinced that we can do better.  We’ll adjust the fine print, maybe even insert great big red arrows to point the way to it, but we’ll try harder and keep as many marks in the win column as we can. 

It would be easy to focus on those marks in the loss column.  When we contemplate them, it does seem that they are written in much darker pencil than the others are.  The truth is, we just need to focus on the goal.  Looking back magnifies the failures, but moving ahead puts them in perspective and motivates us to transcend the past. I like what Tom Krause, a motivational speaker, has to say on the subject.  “There are no failures – just experiences and your reactions to them.”

“Success is falling nine times, and getting up ten.”
(Jon Bon Jovi, American rock musician)

I’m peddling as fast as I can!

~ Paul Phillips ~ 1 Comment

It was one of those days.  As I rolled out this morning (well, yesterday as I write this), I actually thought that it would be a great day.  A Superman day.  You know,  a tights-and-capes, leap-tall-buildings-with-a-single-bound, no-challenge-too-big-to-conquer kind of day.  I’m trying to comprehend what went wrong, but can’t really put my finger on any one event.  I think the beginning of the trouble must have been the running out of milk thing.  Oh, and no instant breakfast, even if there had been a drop of milk in the house.  Ah well, no matter…Onward and upward!  There are damsels in distress to kill and horrible giants to save.  Wait!  That didn’t come out right.  You see what happens when you don’t have a good breakfast?

I won’t bore you with the details of the day, but the best I can do is to say that the damsels didn’t want to be saved and the giants were notable in their absence.  Have you ever noticed that on the really bad days, it’s not usually anything earth-shaking that causes the most disturbance?  Big problems, I can tackle head-on and I know when the task is finished.  It’s the insignificant issues, those little things that wouldn’t merit a second glance if they came in their proper turn to annoy you, that make your carefully ordered world come crashing down when they arrive in droves, as they tend to do so frequently.

My schedule didn’t gel as it should have, must-do jobs were interrupted by trivial phone calls (probably not so to the caller),  my carefully guarded morning marred by  disturbances (deliveries, repairmen, etc.), and not one objective that I needed desperately to reach was completed on time.  A thirty-minute job stretched out to an hour and a half, with other deadlines looming.  One repair which had been assessed by my expert eye as a “snap”, turned out to be just that, literally, with no less than three parts breaking in the process of disassembling the instrument.  Indefatigable salesmen, of late a rare breed, came out of the woodwork today, undoubtedly having been apprised of the situation by Lex Luthor. Having missed my customary morning repast of milk and instant breakfast, it was entirely fitting that the full line-up of the day kept me from my lunch until almost 4:30 in the afternoon.  Needless to say, my PB&J sandwich was eaten standing up

On this day, the avalanche of customers, vendors, and inanimate objects (which seemed to be imbued with life), proved to be too much for this superman.  Not quite so bad as kryptonite, but more like someone standing on your cape all day long.  By the middle of the afternoon, I was beaten and whining like a dog in a thunderstorm, but I persevered, running in place until the lights were turned out and the door locked against the perpetrators.

Come to think of it, I still sound like I’m whining.  Any of you reading this have had equally bad days, marred by worse problems, and probably at a heavier velocity than mine.  We all have them.  Some of us hold up better than others, but we get through them.  Better times lie ahead and we know it.  This evening, the Lovely Lady agreed to a quiet meal at a local eatery and I found, as we sat and talked, enjoying each other’s company and the good food, the epic struggle of the day faded into non-importance.  We’ve seen worse days and come through in fine shape. 

I have to remember not to start believing my own hype.  I’m not Superman and can’t leap buildings in a single bound, but neither is there any kryptonite that can cripple me.  When I believe either the hype or the scare-tactics, I set myself up for an unnecessary fall.  What is true and not hype at all, is that God allows us to develop skills and He gifts us in various and unique ways.  All we have to do is to be faithful in using that which is given to us.  Bad days and good days are guaranteed, but in the long haul, what counts is our commitment to the goal.  Hang in there!

Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful.
(1 Corinthians 4:2 NIV)