Just thanks...

I remember joking with a friend about my mobile phone: ‘I rarely make calls from it, and I receive even less. Even among the rare few that come, most are wrong numbers’. Looking up my call records, I have found that I make the most calls to my ISP’s support centre. I take ‘customer is king’ literally and I have very itchy fingers when it comes to Internet service. The slightest of faults and I am all set to pour my ire on the support people. It may appear that my ISP’s service is appalling, but to be honest, I am quite happy with it. I just hate disruptions and I make it a point to make it known that I do.

Recently I made the switch to a Mac. I got myself an Airport Express Base Station and took my first step into the WiFi realm. Setup was a breeze, but I had to call my ISP yet again to have the base station’s MAC registered. I was expecting a long procedure, but to my surprise, it hardly took a minute to get it done and over with. In fact the person who took my call asked me to try my connection and to get back to him if I had any problems connecting. It was not much of a big deal, but I felt really special: the service was instant, and the person very helpful and polite. I ended up sending a thank you note to the support team.

Sending that note made me remember the words of my former Principal, Francis Fanthome, who is now a senior official of the I.C.S.E Board. One day, when I was in Class VII, Mr Fanthome asked everyone in school to submit to him in small slips of paper, what changes we thought were necessary in our school. As he told us during morning assembly a couple of days later, the list compiled from those slips ran long, but the most common entry was for a swimming pool, which was rumoured to be built the following year. After running through the most common entries, he ended his address by saying that he was disappointed in some ways not to have received a single note saying thanks - the school was just fine as it was. It was only natural for us to expect more from the school, but as he reminded us, there were so many things we had access to, which many others did not.

As a kid, Mr. Fanthome’s words did not strike home, but now it does, loud and clear. Just how many things we take for granted when they are okay. Why are we never grateful for things that work? Why do we only make calls to complain?

I take pride in not being too stingy a person, but why am I so miserly when it comes to ‘thank yous’? I have lost count of the complaints I have made this year: I have made just so many. I can neither count the thank yous I have said so far: there have been too few of them to keep a count of.

Thank Yous come for free – why am I so miserly with them?