Your Sense of Urgency Is Not Going to Make the Impossible Possible

[Dips]

Gah!

I can't stand the customers who keep telling you how much of a hurry they are in, then turn around and stonewall you at every turn while you try to get them taken care of quickly.

And of course, it's your fault that it took so long even though they are the idiots who took forever to do *their* part of the transaction.

Take today's idiot. Well, no. He actually started out as last week's idiot but, due to his own ineptitude, he managed to stretch something that should have taken one hour into a week because he refused to follow instructions or cooperate.

We are working on a time zone difference because he is in Paris, France and I'm near Boston on the east coast the US. That's a 5 hour difference. Which means that my starting time is a bit more than halfway through his workday. Due to that I make sure to take care of customers writing emails to me from Europe, the Middle East and Africa first thing in the morning to be sure they don't have to wait overnight (for them) to read my response.

I get a request to activate from him on 12/4, however he hasn't provided his registration information which is required because he has a special nearly-free license we provided to citizens of France per an agreement with a government-sponsored agency there. I believe they don't charge citizens AT ALL for these special licenses. So he got something that we normally charge $600 for for free or almost free.

Because of this special contract that license type must be registered to A CITIZEN of FRANCE. It cannot be registered to an organzation at all. It cannot be registered to a citizen of any country BUT France.

So I asked for his registration information and made sure to specify that I need *his* name and his address.

He gives me the name of the organization that he is president of and NOT his name.

So I write back and tell him it cannot be registered to his organization but only to him.

And I don't hear from him again until today.

His email consisted the word URGENT in all caps in 24 point font and [finally!] his name. He also made sure to mention that he is *PRESIDENT* of his organization. [That's nice and so what?]

Yay. I registered the license and let him know.

His reply:

Again the word URGENT in all caps in 24 point font and a request to send him an activation code. Problem: I need information from his computer to generate a code; the code literally does not exist until I plug information from his computer into a program on mine.

So I told him to activate on the internet because it's fastest or send me the information from his computer. I told him the sooner he sends it to me the faster I can get the code back to him.

It's been about an hour since I sent that email. If he leaves at 5:00 PM (his time), he has about two minutes left to send me the information unless he feels the matter is urgent enough to stay at work late to get it done.

Why do I expect another URGENT email from him tomorrow?

Edit: So far nothing from him. I guess it wasn't really so urgent after all.

[ArcticChicken]

Why do I expect another URGENT email from him tomorrow?

Because you're an intelligent human being?

[Ironclad Alibi]

Why do I expect another URGENT email from him tomorrow?

He keeps using that word. I do not think he knows what it means.

[EvilEmpryss]

He keeps using that word. I do not think he knows what it means.

Inconceivable!

[bainsidhe]

In his defense, many (if not most) international customers use URGENT as a form of Hello. When we receive international inquiries (I work in manufacturing), 9 out of 10 are labeled URGENT even if they're not. I get that customers want us to respond, but the word begins to lose effectiveness after a while.

Which is why I send truly urgent emails with the header "VERY URGENT: PLEASE RESPOND!"

[Dips]

You guys are killing me.

After I posted that I noticed that he HAD sent me the ref. code on 12/4. I had just forgotten because it had been five days between the time I asked for his name and he finally gave it to me. My bad.

So I generated an activation code from it and sent it him with a disclaimer that, due to the delay there was a decent chance the ref. code he sent on 12/4 was no longer valid, making the activation code I generated also invalid. Since there was also a decent chance it would still work, there was no harm in generating the code and sending it along anyway, seeing as the matter was so URGENT.

As luck would have it, the code wasn't valid when he tried to enter it. Which meant another URGENT email complaining about it this morning.

I told him the four likliest scenarios that could have caused that and how to address each one. ALL FOUR ended with instructions to run the Wizard again and give me the NEW ref. code right away so I could give him a new activation code right away.

It's been hours since I sent him that message. He now has 36 minutes until his workday ends.

You think I've heard back from him?

You think I will before his workday ends?

[MrsEclipse]

I need to file your thread title away in my file of useful phrases. This one goes right next to, "A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine."

I love how this thing is only URGENT when it's sitting in your inbox. When it's in his apparently he has all the time in the world.

[infinitemonkies]

My boss does that. Every e-mail is marked urgent/highest priority and every sentence he's ever written in his life ends with an exclamation mark.

Last week he wanted a comp reservation made for one of his 'friends.' (side note: every single person my boss has ever been friends with is either crazy, an asshole, or both. We have never once done a comp room for someone he knows who was polite or reasonable) Except he got the dates wrong. She was all ready checked in on saturday, the boss said she'd be arriving monday. I sent him a reply that she was already checked in and everything was taken care of. He proceeded to send a total of 8 messages over the next 36 hours asking if the reservation was done, and why hadn't he gotten a copy of it cc'd to him?


Update: It seems my boss stopped by on sunday evening an hour or so before my shift. 2 of the lights along the top of our sign are burned out, and our ice machine is out of order. He emailed the manager demanding both those things get taken care of. Sent, of course, as urgent/top priority. Cause of course, the best time to call in a maintenance guy to work on the ice machine, which hasn't been working for over a week, is at midnight on a sunday. I mean, it's not like going up a 30' ladder in a storm to replace a light bulb is something that could possibly wait until morning.



One of my all time favorite Dilbert strips:
Wally, to PHB "All your emails this week were marked top priority, so I spent all my time working on the first one.... Next week I plan to continue not feeding the squirrels by the east entrance"

[Krivak]

My favorite "Hurry hurry" type was this lady who called our manager to say we got an order wrong. Our manager asks if she still has her reciept, and she says no, and she's in a hurry, so she needs these 2 meals to go fast so she can be at this meeting or w/e.

For the meals, she didnt want one item, she wanted a different item. So 5 minutes later, we see her pull up. (like a speed demon too, whips around the corner, and parks like its her first time trying) Comes inside, acts a little high and mighty, but at least low enough she can at least speak more than "manager" to us little cashiers, and get her food ready. All the while saying she is almost late.
We manage to get her out of our faces in 30 seconds or so (we weren't busy). So she runs out to the car, opens the door, gets in, and stays there. Does she start up the car? No. She sits in the car for 40 minutes before she sends in someone who was in the car for the item she requested to be swapped for the other item, thinking we wouldn't know this. But we didn't want miss "I'm so much in a hurry that i NEED it ready when i get there cause im almost late" to have to get out of her car 40 minutes after the need for speed and come inside and annoy us.

So we walked outside and, very blatantly, wrote down her license plate number. Why? We just wanted to make her paranoid.

[Dips]

Did anybody guess that he didn't get back to me that day (Thursday)?

You're correct!

Did anybody guess he wouldn't get back to me the next day (Friday)?

You're also correct!

Out of curiousity I checked to see if he somehow managed to activate online. That would be hilarious because it takes 45 seconds and requires no assistance from us, which would have made the entire exchange a completely pointless waste of HIS time (not mine; I get paid!).

Well, he didn't. That means he's stuck until Monday since we don't have enough staff to answer emails on weekends. We are now starting the second week of a process that would have been finished in an hour if he had paid attention to the directions [they're even in French in his version].

I really, really wish he complains about how long it took.