Customer Service – good, bad and – well, uh - weird!

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Recently I was cleaning out old – really, really old – files on my computer, the kind that, had they been food, would now be covered with mold and crawling with bugs. Old files! And I came across this story I wrote – oh, probably 12 or 13 years ago. I never did anything with it; maybe I wrote it just to vent. Who knows? It’s a pretty good story, though, so I want to share it with you. Pretty unbelievable, actually. It’s about customer service gone very, very wrong. 

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First Tip for Trade Show Success: Listen!

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After a number of years as the expo hall manager (or “concierge”?), when I was working strictly in non-profit fund development, I finally got a chance to stand on the other side of the table. Just a few weeks ago I had the privilege of representing one of my corporate clients at a healthcare conference. Having been the one to recruit and contract the exhibitors and sponsors, to assign the tables and see that each one’s display packages were available for set up, to check on everyone’s access to electricity and satisfaction with the flow of traffic – finally I got to be one of “them.”

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Your Resume - the very first section

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We’ve said we don’t recommend that you create your own resume. As our friend who is a  licensed mental health counselor, often says, “You are in the worst possible position to understand and appreciate your own value.” That said, you might be determined to do it yourself, and that means you’ll have to create the very first section. It might be the only section of your resume that is ever read.

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Is it "Preventative Medicine"? Nope. Never

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It's "preventive medicine." Does that sound funny to you? Sure, that’s why you want to call it “preventative.” All those syllables just feel right. They make it sound like quantitative or qualitative or administrative. “And “preventative” is a perfectly good word – it’s just not an adjective, so it can’t describe medicine or anything else – not now, not today, not ever.

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The word is a (uh), not a (ay)

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But listen for five minutes to TV news or any political speech, and you'd start to wonder. Recently I was listening to a youthful (and quite exuberant) newscaster on TV delivering breaking news on a rather serious subject.  In her effort to emphasize the seriousness and drama of the situation, she regularly pronounced “a” as “ay,” a long A sound. She seemed to think that such an incorrect pronunciation ramped up the emphasis or importance

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