All I ever needed to know I learned from Craigslist

In the business world, you really can’t turn around without being faced with an article, conversation, or interview question about the importance of communication and how those of us in the workaday world just don’t do a very good job of it.   I’ve rarely met the happy soul that looked at me earnestly and told me how they were fully informed and felt that communication in whatever they were engaging in was sufficient; and usually when I  do meet them they are part of either HR or Marketing so it’s hard to tell if they’re being sincere or not.

I want more information and better communication.  You want more information and better communication.  So what’s the problem here?  Let’s take my chocolate and your peanut butter and you know, see what happens.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I've discovered that all I ever needed to know about what we’re doing wrong I learned from Craigslist. 

We don’t listen:

Buyer:  I’d like to buy your futon frame.

Me:  That’s great! My cell number is xxx-xxx-xxxx; send me a text and let me know when you would like to come and pick it up.  I’m available today after 4, or Saturday until noon or Sunday after 10.

Buyer (doesn’t text, just emails back):  We’ll come after one on Saturday.

Me (smacking my head inside, but trying to be patient):  Sorry, but I am not available after one on Saturday, I can meet before noon Saturday or after 10 on Sunday.

Buyer:  I can’t do before noon at all.  I’ll have to see if we can come early Sunday morning before church. 

I never heard from her again, and I’m kinda OK with that. 

We don’t always speak the same language (sometimes literally)*

Buyer:  Send address.

Me:  It sounds like you want to buy my tool chest.  That’s great!  My cell number is xxx-xxx-xxxx; send me a text and let me know when you would like to come and pick it up.  I’m available after 4:30 every day this week.

Buyer:  $30?

Me:  Yes.  Text me and let’s set something up.

Buyer:  I come?

Me (after looking at his email address and thinking about it for a few minutes): Prefiere espanol?

Buyer:  si por fabor

We go back and forth over a few additional emails and set a time for him to come by.  He never shows up and I never heard from him again.  I’m kinda not OK with that; Babelfish and I bent over backwards for the guy.

We go out of our way to sound legit, thus calling into question the legitimacy of what we’re trying to convey:

Buyer going by the moniker Doomsday Machine: Hi! Are these still available? I'm a Japanese-American and a part of a re-enactment group and would much rather use good re-pop over original for my getup just because I wouldn't want to scrape up the real deal in the dirt and trees and whatnot. Plus these are just in time, since we're coming up on some important dates in the WWII New Guinea campaign vs. the Japanese.

Please let me know, too, if it would be possible to have them sent to Cali. I can send money through walmart or moneygram, since those are literally cash in your hand on your end. Or however you want to do it. I'd even be willing to spring for the cost of having someone like the ups store box it for you so it would be less work for you.

I'm just guessing here, but he probably needs a little help to get the money out of a foreign bank.  If I pay the processing fees of $300 and ship the swords to him while we wait for the bank drafts to clear, he'll like totally give me a cut of it.  

And sometimes we really oughta try a little harder to you know act like we’re paying attention and kind of care:

Buyer:  (responding to an ad listing about 10 different PS3 games for $10.00 each with the just super moniker Im Awesom [sic]) do u have games ill buy them cash right now. please respond if you do.

Me:  The ad lists games for sale…

Buyer: Asking if u still had them. Some people leave the ad up after they sell all the games

Me: Ah.  Yes I still have them. My cell number is xxx-xxx-xxxx; send me a text and let me know when you would like to come and pick them up. 

He ended up coming out and buying the games.  I don’t recall just how “Awesom” he was in person.

We’re lazy:

Buyer, via text:  Let me know when I can come and get the item

Me:  What am I selling?

Buyer:  Sawhorse

Me: You know they come in pairs, right?  I’m just wondering why you called it an item

Buyer:  Oh, I’m buying a bunch of stuff right now and didn’t know which what you were selling until I checked after you asked.

It just got more flaky from there.  In the end I killed the deal.

We don’t change what we say or the way we say it despite some evidence that maybe we should:

Me:  My cell number is xxx-xxx-xxxx; send me a text and let me know when you would like to come and pick them/it up.

I think that I’ll post an ad in the General section next week and sell Communication 101.  An online only affair, you pass if you can send 5 consecutive emails that a) make sense b) have no misspellings c) aren’t written on a cell phone d) have no abbreviations that I have to look up on urbandictionary.com AND are devoid of emoticons. 

I bet I make some money and that it takes a while for my first graduate.  But that’ll be mostly my fault for not clearly communicating the course outline.

*Alternate title:  I say potato and you say papa

One Minute

This week I think we’ll start with a quick snippet of conversation between Terry and Jerry, two IT gurus, and I that occurred a couple of years ago.

“Jerry, the Exchange server was hung yesterday afternoon.  I had Terry hard boot it.”

“You should never do that!  You can have major data corruption or data loss by doing a hard boot!  Why didn’t you call me?  There’s a bunch of different things you guys should have done. But never ever hard boot an Exchange server.  Oh my God, I’ve gotta go make sure the LUNs are still attached, Terry, we better start pulling backups…”

…at this point Jerry goes off for about 10 minutes, looking more and more wild eyed as he describes the total anarchy that is imminent before I jump back in…

“Jerry.  The server was hung.  The.cursor.would.not.move.   Couldn’t kill any processes, couldn’t start or stop services, and couldn’t gently restart it. You didn’t even know that we had an issue until we told you today. What exactly did you want us to do?

“I would have had you hard boot it”.

There was a time when every person in my IT department had a sign in their cube.  Two words were on the sign:

One Minute

The idea is simple and true.  One Minute can save you an hour or even a day’s worth of work.  Take a moment to take a deep breath and think about what you are about to do and more importantly why you are about to do it.  Does it still make sense?  Then go ahead and hit Enter sir.  It doesn’t?  Then go back to the drawing board. 

An IT infrastructure team faces an inordinate amount of pressure to keep things running.  The smallest, most seemingly benign change can have a major impact if not properly prepared for.  When things go wrong, the entire organization is standing at your desk, wanting to know what happened, what you’re doing about it, and when will it be fixed?  There’s a strong sense of urgency to every action in this scenario.  Taking a moment is the last thing that most people want to do.

But that is when it is most important to take that minute.  Pressure can make us take short cuts, make decisions that upon reflection are ill advised, and cause us an inordinate amount of clean up. 

We’re a society that revels in instant gratification and quick fixes, but we all know that slow, steady weight loss is better than a cram diet, that a made to order burger is better than a mass produced patty that contains a percentage of wood fiber in it (although neither really helps with the aforementioned diet), a custom made suit is better than one off the rack from JC Penny. 

Where does this lack of patience come from?  We’re accustomed to having everything at our fingertips, the latest Enter-The –Not-Quite-Celebrity-That-Is-Currently-All-Over-The News’s-Name-Here rumor readily available along with our thoughts and those of 10,000 of our closest friends, that pair of shoes can be here tomorrow with free shipping from Amazon Prime, our car telling us where the closest mass produced hamburger patty is.  I get it, and I readily admit that when a family member recently told me how he orders his toilet paper and paper towels on Prime so that he doesn’t have to go to the store I was all over it.

So all I’m asking for is One Minute. 

I’m not in any way saying that taking a minute will solve all your problems; indeed, there will always be situations that are untenable.  But taking One Minute can lead you to go with Bad Option B instead of Bad Option A, resulting in clean up but far less clean up than Bad Option A would have caused.  Similarly, a little bit of internal validation never hurts, right?  Bad Option A is in fact the only option, so let’s go for it.

Faced with a non-responsive email server and hordes of angry villagers no doubt beginning to form a mob complete with pitchforks, Terry and I took One Minute and did the unthinkable.  Jerry was able to externally validate our decision with far more time than we had to work with.  In the end, we were very lucky.  No loss, no corruption, and Jerry eventually started breathing normally again.  But looking back on it, that minute that we took made us both feel comfortable with the choice that we made, no matter what the outcome might have been. 

Next time you’re faced with a decision, take One Minute.  You’ll be glad that you did.