The Trouble with Time

A few days ago I was reading some of the stories off of the excellent "Not Always Right" website and reflecting that everyone who manages customer service personnel owes it to themselves - and probably to their stockholders, as well - to check in here from time to time. I've often pointed out in this space that the customer isn't always right - or, more correctly, that people who want things from your business that will cost more than you will ever realize from doing business with them aren't really customers. But what a lot of people who have never served in customer service roles themselves often fail to grasp is just how difficult these people make an otherwise straightforward job - and just how insulting some of these "always right" comments can be...

Take, for example, any of the many cases contained in the "Not Always Right" archives in which a "customer" expects free service because they believe that the employee whom they are haranguing does not actually do any work. My favorite is the caterer who was told that preparing, cooking, serving and cleaning up after a dinner for 25 people is "fairly easy" by someone who clearly has never done any of these tasks for themselves (let alone 25 strangers) in their life...

 

I was already familiar with this sort of outrage from my experiences as a freelance management consultant and grant writer, given that most people who have never done either of those functions generally have no idea what it takes to do the tasks involved, but at least most people will grudgingly accept that activities that result in their obtaining large sums of money (either through grant-making organizations or from improved business operations) has some inherent value. My experiences as a writer, either commercially for PRWS or KMH, or freelance on my own, have been considerably worse. It never fails to amaze me how often people who have never written anything longer than an inscription on a birthday card believe that generating hundreds of pages of original material is no harder than typing out the words...

Every writer who has ever lived has had at least one well-intentioned (if completely oblivious) person say something to them along the lines of "Hey! I have a great idea for a [book, screenplay, stage play, website]! Why don't I tell you about it, you can write it, and we can split the profits!" without, apparently, understanding how completely that fails to value our work. And having somebody do the exact same thing (often even in the same words) with a business venture, a non-profit organization, or even a product development scheme is if anything even worse; here our well-meaning layperson has equated not just the hundreds of hours spent writing text but also the thousands of hours and millions or tens of millions of dollars involved in funding the enterprise involved to the ten seconds or so it took them to think up their "big idea"...

Now, I realize that most of the people making these absurd (and infuriating) requests have no idea how badly they are insulting the writers (and consultants) they are devaluing. In most cases, I am quite certain, these folks actually believe that their momentary flash of inspiration really is just as important as the thousands of hours somebody else would have to spend turning it into something real. The majority probably even believe that their friend the writer is simply someone who magically puts words onto the paper through no particular effort, and without the assistance of a "visionary idea person" would have nothing better to do than updating their recipe files. But that doesn't make this any less infuriating for the humble wordsmith on the receiving end of this unwitting arrogance and condescension...

Of course, there remains the question of what to do when someone brings you a project that actually has some merit. But that's a discussion for another day...