danke, merci, gracias, thank you

You can never really say it too much. My parents instilled thank you in me early on. I had to write thank you notes to everyone who gave me a gift. Thank you to servers. Thank you if you held the door open for me. Thank you if you blessed me when I sneezed. It's so automatic for me that when I open a door for someone, and they say thank you, I say thank you, have a great day! I'm the store greeter of life.

People love to complain about customer service. Agents are surly. They are bored and annoyed and just generally unhappy people. We all like to blame it on their bad attitudes or poor life choices, or possibly the idiot they just got done with who called to ask why their computer wouldn't play videocassettes. It's always someone else's fault- someone else who has a bad attitude. We react with our own bratty behavior and the cycle doesn't just continue, it grows exponentially.

I'm big on taking responsibility (as an ideal, not something I'm normally capable of in real life). Maybe it's not enough that our technical support question wasn't silly and it's not enough if we were cordial with the representative. Do you say thank you? When the agent goes above and beyond your expectations and/or their job requirements, do you go above and beyond your requirements as a customer and request to endorse their work to their supervisor? As someone who worked an inbound call center, let me tell you that those endorsements (we called them customer compliments at that job) are money. Not just figuratively, but literally. When you accumulated enough, you got prizes- movie tickets, even a day off. If you got really good, that meant raises and promotions. Yes, the calls are all recorded. But the supervisor picks calls at random- so it might the call with you, the perfectly normal and nice customer, or it could Mr. Ignoramus CrankyPants.

It got harder to do those thank you notes the older I got. When I was a teenager, I felt like I had better things to do than churn out thank yous, especially since my birthday is in December and that meant early January was all notes, all the time. But now that I'm a grownup (supposedly) and I'm often on the giving end of a gift, I realize how meaningful those thank you notes are. And how disappointed I am if I don't get a thank you.

Some final food for thought: in my senior year of college, I had to complete an internship for my major (speech communication). I was intent on doing my internship with a baseball team despite the fact they are extremely competitive. I sent resumes and letters to several local teams (ranging from semi-pro to the Cincinnati Reds). A week later, I received a call from the Reds and got an interview. Unfortunately, they didn't think the schedule would work- they wanted someone who could be there full-time, and I was already going to school and working a full-time job. Despite that, I sent my thank you note afterward- with my name at the top in red ink, just like the resume and cover letter. A couple weeks later, she called and said if I could fit a 20-hour week in, they would love to have me do my internship with the Reds. It wasn't until later that I found out it was the thank you note that got me that internship. This was 10 years ago- before it was standard practice- and she had never received one before. She said, "when I got that thank you note, I knew I had to have you."

And for that, I give thanks.