My Mom was a yeller.

With the births of five sons preceding the delivery of the long hoped for daughter, she had a lot to yell about. It couldn’t have been easy raising five boys, although as a group we were relatively well behaved. But still, we were boys.

With no adult male role model in the home, we relied on Mom to teach us how to be men. It was a daunting task for her to be sure.

These were the days before a rap across the back of the legs with a belt or an ear pull were grounds for a visit from family services. As boys, we all pushed boundaries. Often the lines were boldly redrawn in very loud and unmistakable terms.

She was in charge.

Mom pushed us hard to do well in school because she knew that it was important. She also knew that there were other things that we had to learn. A childhood of living below the poverty line taught me lessons that could not be taught in a classroom setting. The streets of Bed Sty, the Lower East Side, and the South Bronx in the 60’s and 70’s were not places for the weak willed or the ignorant. If we weren’t careful, we knew that life could take a horrific turn in an instant. Tenement fires, idle youth in the streets, drugs, gangs, and crime were just some of the obstacles before us.

Mom stressed the importance of sticking together. She wanted to make sure that anyone who had a mind to mess with one of us was assured that they would have to beat down all five of her sons to get to the one. It worked in that this tact prevented more fights than it allowed.

We were lucky.

She’s mellowed some over the years, but she can still boom her voice over the noisiest clatter in a room to get our attention.

Mom succeeded in seeing us all safely into adulthood. This is a feat that required untold hours of work and a diversity of skills to accomplish, yet there’s really no place for this kind of achievement on a resume.

There’s something wrong with that.

Three days ago, I posted a video on YouTube about my experience with Pennsylvania American Water. At issue was a simple billing error that was exacerbated by the less than helpful response that I received when I placed a call to their customer service. I suppose that I should have been grateful that they answered the phone on a Saturday, but that was as good as it got on that day.

This is a story that just about everyone can tell because we’ve all experienced the frustration of feeling that our concerns were being dismissed. Customer service representatives often have scripts that they follow, which in theory, are supposed to quickly address the most common problems of callers.

But what happens when your problem causes the representative to diverge from the script?

Ah, there’s the rub.

I recorded this video after my problem had been resolved. It was just one of my regular vlog posts, with only 60 views as of this writing, but it seems to have reached the eyes of decision makers at the company.

Take a look.

This morning, I received an anonymous Email, ostensibly from a Pennsylvania American Water employee. Because it was sent to me and not simply commented on my video, I don’t feel comfortable quoting from the text, but I will say that it was a very nice Email that contained some very interesting information.

To the anonymous sender: I thank you for taking the time to send me that Email.

In summary, I was thanked for not lodging a complaint, and I was informed that upper management at the company had taken notice of my video. Also, employees are being coached on using common sense and logic when taking calls as a result. Finally, I was also assured that most employees at the company do actually care and want to help their customers to the best of their abilities.

You know what? I believe him or her.

Most people that I know do take their jobs seriously, and since we all have bad days, I know that people are not always at their best. I was frustrated with my situation at the time, but I didn’t want to cause a big stink or get anyone in trouble when I made this video. However, I am delighted that the video has apparently been well received and that the folks at Pennsylvania American Water are making an effort to improve their customer service, so that the next person in my situation can be spared some needless frustration.

Bravo.

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Have you had a customer service experience that went from wrong to right?  Tell me about it in the comments.

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Pick a day of the work week and someone will have something negative to say about it.

There are a lot of groans heard at job sites everywhere on Mondays, Hump Days gets us half way to the weekend, and Fridays seem to never end.

We often act as if the work week is something that is to be tolerated because the only worthwhile days of the week are Saturday and Sunday. Why do we do this to ourselves?

I’m not immune to lapsing into this type of thinking from time to time, but generally, I have a positive attitude about work and working. I’m fortunate to have an interesting job and I work with good people, so the experience, for me, is often engaging and stimulating.

There are many measures of success and the ways in which we can contribute to those measures are just as varied. Some measures are easy to recognize, while others are much less apparent.  Often, it is how we view our efforts in the workplace that can add texture to routine tasks and give us a sense of the positive effects that we can have on the broader enterprise.

Compiling data, modeling scenarios, management reporting, and interpreting results are all part of contributing to the making of business decisions. Having worked at many levels of accounting, from billing clerk through management during the last three decades, I’ve always found accounting to be interesting work.

Many businesses have seen declines in revenue during the current economic downturn. When these declines are coupled with rising expenses the job becomes more relevant. Accounting is usually considered to be an austere profession that is devoid of emotion, because the numbers tell us what we should do. But in reality, particularly for a small business, it’s difficult to maintain a detached view of the consequences of decisions because of the effects that those decisions have on people.

Even during good times, management decisions have consequences. The annual review of benefit packages, the construction of the appraisal process, the location of the business, the level of investment in technology, and many other decisions determine not only the profitability of the business but also the environment in which its employees spend a good portion of their lives.

When working for large corporations in similar circumstances, but at lower levels of accountability, the decompartmentalized structure of responsibilities made it seem much more like a numbers game. The ability to offer alternatives was limited and the response to those suggestions, when offered, was disappointing at best.

Long hours, constant churning of ideas – even during off hours – and the near maniacal focus on the well being of the business tends to be exhausting, but oddly the experience is also exhilarating.

Striving to find a way to “work it out” so that the business and the people who work there can both continue to thrive can be a bit daunting, but doing this type of work is also very satisfying when the result of one’s efforts can be measured both on and off of the Balance Sheet.

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• How do you view your job?
• What are the aspects of your job that get you energized?
• How do you measure success?

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