Horse 2917 - You Owe It To Us To Keep Us Updated

"Dear Andrew,

This is a friendly reminder that as an important client who is themselves on the clock, I will make daily enquiries about progress on the work for which I have engaged you.

Please do not think that this is harassing you for your work. It is important for you to remember that as we have pay you for your services, you at the very least owe it to us to keep us updated on the progress.

Yours sincerely,

Name withheld."

It took exactly four days after returning to after an understandable but involuntary lockdown, for me to get an email of this nature. I would have liked to have seen among the products of this lockdown, more patience, kindness and perhaps even gentleness from the general population but I suppose that that is asking way too much. While years of lockdown and physical endangerment during a war was enough to galvanise people together into a kind of post- war commonwealth, practically everyone who lived through that is now dead and along with them, that commonwealth. Hundreds of days is not enough time to overcome human nature.

This kind of email doesn't really surprise me at all, as I understand very well that other people have deadlines. It's just that having been through the eye of the storm, I was not expecting to see the other side of the whirlwind this early.

I do not know if this is because of this unique moment in time or human nature generally but I sense that something may have changed in the world. Thanks to companies such as Doordash, Menulog and UberEats, along with loads of other click and collect services, which can have the ability to track where an order is, people's expectations may have changed. In a world where everything being on demand is becoming even more on demand, then the art of waiting may have been declared as worthless by the impulsive.

This trend has been coming upon us ever slowly since the 1950s. We have gone from car side service, to drive through service, to home delivery and now real time tracking home delivery. It is like everyone now has an analogue to room service, where you can push a button for a sandwich and a liveried bell hop with a sandwich appears. We do not have to care about the bell hop, as soon as we get our sandwich, they can go away and instantly disappear.

Or rather, to be more specific and truthful, the liveried bell hop appears for those people who the wealth and means to afford liveried bell hops. For everyone else, we have to remain outside of this magical land of instant gratification. We are the vehicles through which that gratification is delivered and if we fail to deliver, we fail at our only useful purpose to those for whom liveried bell hops appear.

So then, having been trained by the environment in which these people live in, they think that the rules of liveried bell hops, apply to everyone who happens to provide them with any service whatsoever. That's fine if that's the way that you want to conduct yourself but if everything is reduced to mere instant gratification with airs of impatience attached, then do not be surprised if that creates feelings of annoyance in your service providers.

By definition, to harass means to trouble or annoy continually or repeatedly. Making "daily enquiries about progress", fits this definition like a hand in a glove. Also, as money is fungible, that is that any dollar is as good as any other dollar, then as someone who is doing work to be paid dollars on a commercial basis, then I have quite different definitions of what an "important client" is, to someone who might see themselves as an important client.

As far as I'm concerned, kind clients actually provide me with something which money is unable to account for. 

As for the phrase "you at the very least owe it to us", I find this nonsensical as I don't owe anybody anything unless there has been an obligation established. If you have contracted me to deliver n widgets on the 35th of Catember, then my obligation extends as far as to delivering n widgets on or before the 35th of Catember. If it is the 32nd of Catember, then I don't care what kind of obligation that you think that I have towards you, until the 35th I can literally be playing golf on the moon and there ain't diddly squat that you can do about it.

If I deliver less than n widgets, then there is a problem. If I deliver n widgets after the 35th of Catember, then there is a problem. How I assign my time, on my clock, is my business. 

Inside our firm, my obligations are to my boss, who can make whatever reasonable demands, including updates on work in progress, he thinks is necessary. However, outside that ring fence, that obligation simply does not exist.

I have a feeling that this kind of sentiment exists in other fields of business where there is more than just an obligation to deliver n widgets on the 35th of Catember. The whole of the legal and paralegal industry is full of people who think that they're superstars and who push their minions to dance their strange foxtrot. The creative world where artists are commissioned to create pieces is just as awful, as people who know not and care not about the process, only know how to demand. It is probably far less prevalent in the trades, where the product can be seen as it is being constructed.

I am wondering if I should just write an automated reply message which produces a percentage based upon the time left. That way, they would be replied to, in their daily enquiries about progress, and I would still continue to work according to the only person whom I actually owe it to, to keep updated on the progress, my boss.

By the way, it's 23.3%