I’m a reasonably reliable person. I’m certainly not flaky. I may get drunk, oversleep, and only remember an appointment at the last moment, but I will send you an excuse apologizing, and letting you know that I really want to be there, but something is preventing me.
And the next time, I will be there. I’d say I communicate 100% of the time, and do what I say I’m going to do 90%. Those are imperfect numbers, but in my neck of the woods they seem to make me elite.
And there are certainly people who are actually reliable, but who are working on things without telling me. To my mind, completing a task STARTS with informing the person affected you are starting on it. Until then, making sure is on their to-do list, since although YOU may know what a solid always do the right thing person you are, the rest of us, absent long experience with no exceptions, don’t.
Lately I’m dealing with more and more people who just don’t communicate. As easy as it is–a few keystrokes for a very short message which is infinitely different from a non-existent one–it is too much for many. They seemingly don’t realize that there is a two way street, that there are two people, and that even if YOU know what you are thinking, if you don’t communicate it, you have left the other person hanging, which is an impolite thing to do.
And I was pondering several recent incidents, and it hit me that, whether this recent bout of dealing with flakiness is just bad luck on my part or not, there is no way the past 18 months of misery, confusion, darkness and fog have not left an indelible print on much of humanity.
I think most of us, when this ends–if indeed it ever DOES end, with Australia’s example being so extreme it has to be seen as political conditioning and perhaps foreshadowing–will find ourselves a bit less happy, a bit less trusting, somewhat bitter at the loss of life, less spontaneous, and a bit more irritable.
Why not assume this was intended? Answer that question in your own way. I am not even asserting it was intended, although there is ZERO doubt in my mind none of the people running this thing give a flying fuck either way otherwise. I am simply saying that a grayer people is a more manageable people.
And I will remind you that the Color of the Year in Corporate America–which I interact with daily–seems to be battleship gray. No joke.
Update (I don’t think I’ve ever done an update): one of the flaky people–I have about 4 in mind specifically–just had an emergency surgery to remove his gall bladder. He was in the hospital until today. That’s a quite satisfactory reason not to communicate.