Once upon a time in my corporate life, Stephen Covey training was a big thing. One of the key takeaways? Seek first to understand. Basically try to understand what it is like to be in the other person's shoes and what might be motivating them to behave the way they do.
Maybe they just stepped in something bad?
In this community and real estate in general, it's easy to make snap judgments about people and situations, and sometimes we don't really want to understand do we?
Why is a jerk a jerk and a troll a troll? Maybe they've got a good reason for it, maybe not.
Other times, jerkish behavior may be just a bad moment, or (been there, done that) a client asking you as their agent to do something you REALLY recommended against, but hey..fiduciary. Siggghhhhh. I guess that makes me a professional jerk for the moment.
We've all got stuff going on behind the scenes, both personal and professional.
E.g. I tend to keep the personal just that, personal. This never went out on my Facebook page or in my blog posts, but my father spent five weeks in the hospital this year. What started off as something fairly "routine" (if you can ever consider dealing with the big C and removal of human body parts routine), got more complicated. Long story short, he's home recovering (finally) and that time period was a wee bit stressful for my family and me.
As you might guess, my tolerance for petty stuff wasn't so great during those weeks, and to a certain degree still isn't. Just call it another one of Life's perspective checks.
Most of what we get wrapped around the axle here in the Rain falls into the category of what I consider "first world problems".
Can't tag, have to use a workaround to edit a post, not getting email notifications, spellcheck just tells you it's wrong, but doesn't offer a correction? Sometimes I have to scroll down from the outside edge instead of within the blog editor?
I'm okay with every bit of that.
I appreciate the fact that the site still runs, and all things considered runs pretty well considering we haven't had a Bob or Kerrie type presence in years and years. We don't need a Bob or Kerrie to let someone know they've crossed the line of good behavior in this community.
I haven't paid Ben a dime in over a decade, and yet I'm still able to come here any day, write as many (or as few) posts as I want, leave comments, gain knowledge, build relationships, etc.
Everything I consider essential still works.
Make the issues known to the powers that be, then roll on. It gets fixed when it gets fixed, and I know reminding them about it daily isn't going to make it happen any faster.
Personally, I don't envy Ben the stress that comes with owning this site and being responsible for herding the cats that are this community.
I don't know enough about reprogramming a site like this to know what developers should or shouldn't be able to do in a certain amount of time, but I suspect it's one helluva coding Jenga game they're having to play.
I'm an engineer and a pragmatist. Perfection is nice, but not expected, and often not even necessary to succeed.
In the interim, I'll try to seek to understand. Sometimes I will, and sometimes I may just call it a day because I've already reached my jerk quota :)
Until next Tuesday, just Ask An Ambassador if you need help,
Bill of Bill & Liz aka BLiz
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