A Different Approach

I was supposed to meet with the Russians tonight, the Sister City program. I was actually up or the meeting even getting psyched for the meeting. Joe who schedules the meeting( all the Russians use American christian alias’) sent out an email yesterday letting everyone know about the meeting and that this meeting, the first meeting of the year would be a special meeting and everyone in encouraged to bring a favorite dish. “ Cool” I think to myself and return to my day not thinking anymore about the meeting./dinner. So, this morning when I open up my emails I have this from Joe

>>> Sergey 1/3/2007 8:23 PM >>>

Dear Friends, unfortunately, it looks like everybody is very busy this Thursday for our meeting, because nobody give to me replay, yet. No problem, lets do it at next time.

Please, let me know, if you have other though.

Sincerely,

This email went out to a bunch of people I cannot believe that not one of us had the consideration to reply. This is sad. The snow is falling today with gusto so I feel it is just as well the meeting was canceled. I really don’t want to be driving in this stuff after dark any later then I have to. The good part about the cancellation is that I brought my van in because I did not want to have to ride the train home after 8:00 or 9:00 pm. So with any luck I might even be able to get hoe before true darkness sets in.

For some reason I had some real feelings of inadequacy this morning when I came into work. I felt I should know more about resources and information I give out over the phones. I have paid close attention to what I do all this day and I think I am doing all right regardless of what I may not know. I need to carve some time out of my day and do some boning up on bits of information I need to know better i.e. ADA legislation, Transportation issues and direct care issues in the local area. The boss informed me over lunch she did a newspaper article this morning and she listed our phone number for inquisitive folks who want to know more. What I have found is that I tend to spend a great deal of time with the phone calls I get—many times the callers are convinced there are no more solutions for them to their problems. In a great many cases this maybe, sadly, there maybe not be an acceptable solution. But in almost most every case I get to work on, even those with poor solutions the caller feels marginally better when I true the caller loose off the phone. Maybe be that is the skill I bring to the job—I can look up the specs of what ever I need to or the phone number—any trained monkey can do that. But what I do well is,I give the caller insights and hope and backdoor approaches to problems they had all but given up on.

I am feeling better now then I did this morning. I still have work to do but I am doing OK.