How a Young Woman's Addiction to Her

Blackberry Cost Me $1300

by Glenn Shepard

May 18, 2010

On Monday, May 3rd, the property manager of the industrial park where my company is located - who I'll call Tiffany - began sending emails to all the businesses affected by the flood.

But the same four feet of water that devastated these businesses also wiped out our computers, phone lines, and cable Internet.

Tiffany is a young woman who sends and receives all her email on her Blackberry, and it never occurred to her that most of her business tenants don't.

Virtually no one received her emails, and this made a bad situation worse.

One problem with flooding in an industrial park is that companies have to discard warehouses full of water-damaged inventory, and the trash piles become so enormous that vehicles can't get through.

The manufacturing company next to us brought in an 18 wheel tractor-trailer every day to haul off their trash, which caused a traffic jam in the alley behind us.

Our waste disposal service normally empties our dumpster every week, but we temporarily had them coming out twice a day. This not only made the traffic jam worse, but it also cost me an extra $650 per day.

After four trips, we decided the landlord should be providing the extra pickup service during the crisis.

Rebecca found Tiffany, and using an ancient method of communication called “Face to Face Conversation”, explained the dilemma.

Tiffany was apparently unaccustomed to this ancient communication method, because she continued reading the emails on her Blackberry while Rebecca was talking to her.

Rebecca finally screamed, "Would you PLEASE look at me when I'm talking to you?" and explained the problem with the garbage removal.

Tiffany responded, “Oh, you don’t have to pay for that. We have front loaders picking up the garbage every day. Didn’t you get my email?”

Even though it would have felt pretty good to shove that Blackberry down Tiffany's throat, technically, she didn't do anything wrong by emailing the announcement. (Reading email while a customer was talking to her was wrong, but that's a different subject).

Email is how Tiffany has always sent announcements to tenants, such as when the parking lot is going to be repaved.

While she should have thought about the fact that most of her tenants didn't have email access after the flood, most of us were still in shock and weren't thinking clearly at the time.

The real communication breakdown wasn't as much from the flood damage, as it was from the generation gap in how we communicate.

The next day when Tiffany's superiors flew in from Chicago, Memphis, and Atlanta, they sent Tiffany from office to office to make announcements face to face, and introduced her to an ancient method of transportation which she also seemed quite unfamiliar with - a bicycle.

As we teach in our program on how to work with the different generations, Baby Boomers are more comfortable with face-to-face conversations, while Generation Y would rather text message or email someone - even if they're in the same room.

This is why it's important for managers to define proper protocol for communicating with coworkers and customers, and proper etiquette (like NOT text messaging when a customer is talking to you).

To Your Success,

P.S. Ironically, the lawyer who was gathering tenants' names to file a lawsuit against Tiffany's company for failing to disclose that the industrial park is in a flood plain, was a young guy, but was quite a master of the ancient communication method of face-to-face conversation.