I’m aware that it’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunday”. I’m trying out a play on words as a lament for Monday.
I think my pain is impacted by the fact that I was helping out with my third move for the month of October. My brother moved on the 18th. My wife and I moved into our new place on the 25th, and this past Saturday my brother-in-law moved as well.
The bonus is that I feel like I’ve been excercising, and there’s some ambition to start running again. The downside is the soreness, and overall death-like fatigue I’ve been suffering, accompanied by a child who has trouble sleeping because his pearly whites are tearing through his gums for the first time.
But that’s all that I really have to complain about: thats the worst I can come up with.
I think people like to complain. I know that I love it. It gives people common ground for discussion, and complaining is so embedded in our culture. I think there is a serious line that shouldn’t be crossed where complaining turns into talking bad about someone.
The company I work for has a contact form that was actively being used until we made some major improvements to it. The comments from the contact form were from people who would call us idiots, or worse because obviously we don’t know anything about websites, which at the time and state of the website, I don’t blame them for making that assumption.
When I thought about what their complaint was, it really comes down to one thing: result did not meet expectation. In the end, I’ve been discovering more and more that meeting or beating an expectation is how to keep people happy. Sometimes that’s unreasonable, and so when that’s the case, don’t bother.
The folks at 37Signals have a similar idea where they believe that value must be greater than the price. Web is tricky, because nobody really has a proper sense on what value a website has. I think we (as a web community) are slowly learning though.
It might be an over simplification. I’m still young. I’ve got years to become jaded and skeptical. I’m ok with being wrong.
Tags: 37Signals, be wrong, complain, keep people happy, monday, moving, U2