"No Thank you". A polite response to an suggestion which is not being accepted. Not the greatest of responses, perhaps, to an offer, but oft understandable and accepted.

No "Thank You". Rude, At least in my culture; the lack of getting back to someone who's done you a favour over and above the call of their duty.

The contrast came to me this morning when reviewing posts on our Opentalk Forum; we offer free technical support there to the delagates who have been on our courses, ensuring that any little issues that arise after they've completed a quite intensive training session can be fixed in short measure, rather than leaving them to pull out their hair for hours or days when I (or someone else who posts there) can sort them out in seconds or minutes.

A policy decision, made early on, to allow "Open posting" to Opentalk. And by that I mean that we'll accept and give pointers to people who have not attended courses, and indeed who haven't bought any services at all off us. Occasionally - vey occasionally - that directly makes a new contact for us who may end up as a customer. But much more often, and very valuably, new questions from people froma very different background to mine trigger me and the people who help to answer the questions into writing a really good and clear new explanation of something, and into realising what extra topics should be covered on the web site or course.

But there are a number of "single question" posters who ask their question, read the reply (well - I GUESS they read the reply), but then don't bother to even say "Thank You" or "Yes that worked". Personally, I find that attitude to be presumptive and uncaring; in my personal case, it leads me to give rather less attention to any posts that may trigger my "single poster alert" (there are certain metrics from which I can guess who is likely to come back). And yet ... sometimes the lack of feedback can be put down to culture ... sometimes to a lack of enough intelligence and thought on the poster's part to appreciate how rude they are being ... and sometimes to a personal crisis; I've learned about one or two of these well after the event in the past, and in turn my wondering and slagging people off has turned out to be inappropriate.

There's the lady who went into labour early ... and came back on the forum 3 months later to announce the arrival of a daughter and apologise for her apparent rudeness.

There's the hotel "No Show" who reported a motorcycle accident to a close friend; somehow, the frustration of sitting around until after midnight just melted away.

And there's the "one shot" enquirer - with a very odd but interesting technical question - who turned out to be working in a university in a country that the Americans invaded a couple of years back; a real human being ... I don't know what happened, but somehow this is one lack of a "Thank You" with extenuating circumstances.

Why am I writing this? To post a link on a forum thread, explaining my background / approach to others who do huge work to help me. To say "Thank You" to them, but also to say "I share your frustrations sometimes; I know how it feels, but let it be". It would be a very sad world if we went around assuming the worst of everyone, wouldn't it?
(written 2007-09-23 10:25:57)

 G903 - Well House Consultants - Running and moderating forums

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