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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday January 15, 2001 Volume III Number 3 |
FOCUS - Tracking Numbers
“Have you got your tracking number?”
“No,” I said, with a ring of disgust in my voice.
I gotta believe that the telephone jockeys in the service pit who spend their days under a headset “assisting other customers” while the rest of the world is lulled into hypnosis by mind numbing easy listening music on hold can pick it up in an instant. You know that tone, that rolling of the eyes and that slow downward shake of the head - you don’t need a videophone to see it. You can hear it. You can hear it in the two-letter word, “no.”
“No. I don’t,” I repeated.
This time I said it with an accentuated, dripping sarcasm that really said, “C’mon, give me a break, what do you mean, ‘do you have your tracking number?’ Do you have any idea how many passwords, codes, telephone numbers, zip codes, area codes, identification numbers I am supposed to remember… have you got a clue? They are scattered all over my desk, my hard drive, my house. No I do not have my tracking number or my pass-code. I do not have my receipt. I cannot remember who it was I spoke to in your office last Tuesday, or was it Monday. Or maybe Wednesday. I’ve been on this crummy phone line for the last forty-five minutes waiting here at my desk just for the privilege of hearing your detached voice hit me with a pop quiz and now you tell me that you can not do a name search or a vender search or any other alternative search for a guy like me whose wallet is brimming over with receipts and debit records and all manner of irrelevant information that will never ever be looked at again, stuff I can’t even throw away because some crook will find it in the trash and rip me off and destroy my credit, and you want to know, ‘Have you got your tracking number?’ What are you guys smoking over there, anyway?”
I said all that in the little phrase, “No, I don’t.”
It must be a game for those poor people barely making a living, those service personnel folks who are paid peanuts to be living proof that the corporate mission statement is operational – you know the one that promises that the customer is royalty and our first priority, the certified pledge filled with promises of satisfaction guaranteed, and ‘we will do whatever it takes to make sure that your experience with our company exceeds your wildest expectations.’ It’s hanging on the walls of the phone pit. I suppose there are morning pep-talks, and energetic consultants who enthusiastically teach the fine art of customer relations, probably there are psychotherapists in the wings there to assist the front line crew in the wake of a particularly nasty exchange. Management wants to be sure that none “go Postal.”
(This is a new phrase – it’s an unfortunate reference to the many Postal workers who have finally had enough and something snaps and they show up one awful day armed with grenades and automatic weapons and gun down their fellow Postal workers that I guess they never really liked in the first place. Once we said, “gone berserk.” Now we call it “gone Postal.”)
The service veterans in the pit can tell how the next call is going to go from the first sound of the next customer’s voice. Will this be pleasant or contentious? Will this end in resolution or threats of revolution? They probably know the outcome at the first sound of the voice at the other end.
That’s why they don’t say, “Hi, my name is Kim, how may I help you?”
The first thing you hear is, “have you got your tracking number?”
I suppose there are some people who have the tracking number.
I’m rarely one of them.
* * * * * * * *
Allen and Pam found each other ten years ago. Not really for the first time. They met in high school. At a church retreat.
When they got married, they wanted to keep it simple and fun. They escaped to Las Vegas, and found a justice of the peace at the Excalibur. As he appeared for the brief ceremony, Allen and Pam laughed out loud. It was Merlin the Magician. He wore a brightly colored robe and a pointed cap covered with stars and crescent moons and comets in flight and he carried a magic wand, looking like a combination Sorcerer from King Arthur’s Court and a character from Disney’s Fantasia. He waved the wand over the couple and with an enchanting smile said, “do you Pam take Allen as your lawfully wedded husband?” Pam answered, “I do.” And then he asked Allen the same question, and got the same reply.
When Merlin said, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” Allen kissed his bride. It was chapter two for them both.
Allen’s first marriage had been brief. And sadly disappointing. Pam’s left her with three young daughters.
And in the ten years that followed, they rediscovered something else… a relationship with the living God.
So on their tenth anniversary, just two weeks ago, the three girls, now teenagers, planned the entire ceremony. They invited about a hundred friends, including Pastor Bill, to come to a beautiful garden. Allen wore a tux. The girls dressed as bridesmaids, in elegant black velvet.
We live in a country town. I guess you would say we like it because it is so “laid back.” When Bill arrived with his wife Sharon to start a church, he said, “I want to pastor a church for people who don’t do church.” He added, “I want people to come just as they are.” So he set the pace. When he preaches from the Bible, you’ll generally find him wearing hiking boots, or tennis shoes. Sometimes in blue jeans. Or more often dockers. A print shirt. And always, always, an open collar.
When we arrived at the Gardens for Allen and Pam’s re-commitment ceremony, the first real surprise for Carolyn and me was to find our Pastor Bill, standing near the floral wedding arbor in a gray suit, white shirt and muted tie. Some one said, “look at Bill. Can you believe it? He cleans up pretty good.” And you know what? He did.
As we all gathered on a green lawn near the
white folding chairs set in neat rows under a sprawling oak tree, the sound of
a diesel engine revving called our attention, and around the bend a bright
green John Deere tractor driven by a man dressed in formal Western attire,
black hat, jacket, polished black boots, white shirt and narrow tie, pulled a
wagon up to the waiting crowd of onlookers carrying the glowing bride dressed
in white and her young pretty bridesmaids.
The tractor stopped, and the driver shut down the engine.
Allen took the microphone. He said, “Welcome everybody. Thank you for being here on this special day. I’m not accustomed to making speeches, but I want to make one today. Bear with me. I’ve thought about this for a long time.”
Pam watched and listened. Couples in the crowd found each other, and drew close, hanging on as though this moment brought back a flood of warm memories – that moment of joy and wonder celebrating the milestone of commitment that set the course of a good life. The girls beamed with pride, each face reflecting their mom’s charm and grace. Allen continued.
“I fell in love with Pam when I was a high school kid. Our lives went different directions, but when we met again years later, after some rough bumps along the way, we both were starting over. We ran off, had a really fun wedding, and our life has been really good. But at our wedding, ten years ago today,” he said, “there was one thing missing. We left God out.”
“I’m more deeply in love with Pam than I ever knew I could be. Today, on our tenth wedding anniversary, before our friends and our family, we want to repeat our vows once more. We’ve asked our Pastor to lead us. We want our friends in the faith to stand with us. We want God to bless our marriage, our home and our family. That’s why we are here today.”
With that, the music began. Pam and the girls were escorted off the wagon, and led single file through the crowd, up the aisle on the lawn, over pink flower pedals to the arbor where Bill waited in a suit and tie and black shoes with a brilliant shine and an open Bible from which he read, “Love is patient, love is kind…”
We’ve been looking at the pictures from that ceremony in the garden. The photographs capture the faces of Allen and Pam’s friends standing round as Bill talked to the pair about their marriage, and the way they have modeled a winsome Christian witness to us all and then led them through their promises and in those faces, you can see in the approving smiles as couples stood facing toward the front and each man wrapping his arms around his woman and her hair on his cheek and she with her head back on his shoulder holding his arms with hers and the warm eyes all focused on the couple under the arbor before the good Reverend with the open book. You sensed that in a mystical way the God of the Universe was there, too.
And He was saying, “this is good. This is right.”
* * * * * * * *
The technology is incredible.
When our son Kevin ordered a camera for his girlfriend on the Internet a week ago Friday, they said it would be shipped UPS in seven days. That was about right because Sonya leaves for Rome on Tuesday. She is taking her fourth college semester as an art major in Italy. Her gift would arrive Friday.
Kevin scoured the World Wide Web for the best deal, and found it somewhere in New Jersey. The gruff, humorless order-taker barked, “call back Sunday for your tracking number.”
Every time a UPS package passes a station en-route, an electronic reader scans the code and puts the information into a database. It’s not only a time and date stamp, it identifies the package, the sender, the destination and the location of the scanner. The data is then uploaded to a satellite and beamed down to a central computer, which translates the information and posts it to a web site making the information available on the Internet. Amazing.
So Kevin called last Sunday. And got the tracking number. He logged on to the UPS Website and sure enough, there it was. The package had been picked up in New Jersey, and sent to New York. It was scheduled to arrive in our office on Friday, January 12. That’s what the website said.
When Friday came, the package did not. We waited. And finally checked the web site once more. Curiously, there were no more entries. The report was unchanged from last week. It had been picked up in Jersey, sent to New York. And then it disappeared.
So late Friday afternoon, I called UPS. And waited for the next available service representative because “your call is important to us” and it will be answered in the order in which it was received is what they told me every three minutes as I nodded off to their elevator music. Finally…
“Do you have your tracking number?”
No. I don’t. It was sitting on the lamp table in the living room back home twenty five minutes away, I told the service rep.
* * * * * *
Bill showed up on the front page of Friday’s countywide newspaper. He looked grim. For good reason. Dressed this time in a County Sheriff’s Chaplain jacket, he stood with another grief stricken onlooker beside the wreckage of a smashed Ford Courier.
Our high school quarterback and his girl friend pulled out from a side street on Friday afternoon just as school let out for the weekend to make a routine left turn onto one of our main thoroughfares when an unseen Expedition, a giant SUV, t-boned their little car broadside, killing both teenagers instantly. The driver of the SUV, a young woman, remains in critical condition.
Our little town did not expect to spend this weekend in mourning. But that’s where we are.
And Pastor Bill was there.
* * * * * * *
The service rep told me that there was only one alternative.
The sender must order a trace. (The sender’s office is closed for the weekend.) The trace cannot be ordered by the receiver (us). A trace will take eight business days. (Sonya leaves for Rome on Tuesday – did I mention that?) From the looks of the scanning report, the rep noted, this package was lost. Generally, you will see eight to ten data entries on a coast-to-coast delivery over a five-day period. Clearly, the package was picked up, she said, but it seems to have vanished somewhere in New York.
Great.
So I went home. No delivery. No gift. Kevin’s disappointment was monumental. We started making plans to find another camera in one of those stores you drive to… you know, the kind where you pay at the counter and take your merchandise home with you on the same day. It meant we’d spend a good part of the weekend shopping.
Before Kevin hit the sack late Friday night, he checked the website one more time. Just out of curiosity. His eyes widened. Four new entries appeared on the screen. At 9:45PM that same night, the package was scanned in Ontario, California. And was on its way to San Marcos, just north of San Diego. The delivery date was changed to Monday.
Sonya leaves Tuesday.
High fives all around.
* * * * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we were in possession of our life’s tracking number? If somehow, we could anticipate arrival dates with precision, watch every transfer, and know in advance where it’s all going?
Do you have your tracking number? No, you don’t. You do your best. You cover the base. You prepare for contingencies. You put the back up plan in place. But really, you still don’t know.
You don’t know when some unseen SUV might t-bone you or the people you love. You don’t really know exactly when that package that is so important to you and your future is going to arrive. And those people who say they can help… well, they have their limits, too.
When Allen and Pam looked at each other as high school kids with longing in their eyes and a glimpse of a dream of happiness, they had no idea what hurtles they would encounter on the road toward the fulfillment of that dream. And ultimately, they learned to trade Merlin the Magician for Pastor Bill.
Let’s learn from them.
You and I don’t have the tracking number. But we know Who does.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2001
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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