Conference 7.286::digital

    Greg,
    
    Improve the story by naming the helpers - and what the main helpers
    did.  It might foster more of it (yes, there already is lots of it).
    
    Think.  I'd guess it was not that persons job to do what he/she did,
    especially on Sunday.  Should he get credit where credit counts - with
    his management - who knows?  I'd like to think so.  Betcha he doesn't
    tell anyone.  But, if the thanks were in the note, maybe he might.  At
    the least it would contribute to his own sense of satisfaction.
    
    Fred
    
    Fred

While you're at it, raid the coffee fund and send the hero some flowers
(or chocolate) to be delivered to his/her office.  (Or one of those
"dinner's on me" checks from Amex -- my brother got one last year for
giving some guy CPR at a restaurant.)

Martin.

    The replies to this note bring up a real good point, and one that is
    getting to be a sore one with a number of people that I know. 

    Over the past few months I've noticed more and more that I've been
    getting a lot of mail asking for help on some things that I'm involved
    in or have been involved in during the past. Often these people are
    folks I've never heard of before, or that met me in a class n years ago
    or found my name in a QAR system or a notes file (including employee
    interest conferences) or knew someone that thought I might know the
    answer or who to contact. Usually it seems to be a sales support situation
    or a need to debug or work around something real fast. I usually try to
    help these folks, usually on my own time. Sometimes it only takes a
    couple of minutes, but often it can take from a half hour to a couple of
    hours. Now, I'm really glad to help out folks in the field, especially
    those doing sales support these days, but rarely do I even get a piece of
    mail back acknowledging that they got my response, let alone saying
    "thanks for taking the time". This has happened to me six times in the last
    three weeks, and from conversations I've had with others, it sounds
    like it is becoming very common place.

    I guess all I'm trying to say here (especially in light of all the
    bruhahah that has been going on in 991) is if you contact someone out of
    the blue and ask for something, and she/he is  nice enough to help
    you out, please take the time to mail back the words "thank you" to
    the person that helped you. It might make her/him  less apt to ignore or
    refuse a future request from you or someone else.

    Deb

    re .4

    Hi, Deb, good to see you again. Let's see, "run time dimensioned array
    subscripts not calculated properly when BASIC program is compiled with
    'option inactive = subscript checking,'" over five years ago, when I
    first came to DEC. I think I had been here for about two or three weeks.
    You were a timely and efficient life-saver. (I never forget a favor!)

    I see the same problem. My "classic" case was preparing a software
    services checklist. I busted my chops, even putting together the
    camera-ready materials, got no recognition from the manager I did it
    for. ["I'll tell the area manager in a couple of weeks."]  Then, when I
    customized it for another area, I got a memo back from the person I was
    working with that said, "Thank you for the materials. I have 37
    questions about what you sent me" -- copied to his area management and
    our area staff. Well, there were only about 4 real questions (the rest
    were presentation semantics, where we did it my way). A letter of
    thanks? A phone call? Nah. I keep a copy of his memo as a reminder to
    never be thankless to anyone. At times I still seethe over it. Yes, I
    take things personally. If you care about what you do, is there any
    other way?

    Then, of course, there is also the widespread practice of managers at
    DEC not thanking their people for jobs well done. (Talk about another
    can of worms!)

    I have my faults, like being very bad at keeping up with friends. But
    those who know me know that I'll go way out of my way and drop
    everything when I get an SOS -- even if I have to hunt for an answer
    about something I know nothing about. I don't ask for anything in
    return, but a "thank-you" does feel good.

    If everyone at DEC said "thank-you" a few times a day, I bet we'd all be
    a lot happier.

    So, have _you_ said "thank-you" to someone today?

    /Petes

re: .4,.5,

	These are yet more reasons why we desperately need an info-market.
    Information providers acting out of common courtesy towards a common
    utopian goal of corporate goodness.  Give me a break!  Humans have
    their limitations.  If the world operated on nothing but thank-you's,
    then we'd spend %90 of our time standing on a stage reciting names of
    people who ever had anything to do with something you have ever used
    in your lifetime (life would be like one long & boring academie award
    acceptance speech).

	What if every time you consumed a stick of chewing gum, instead of
    merely paying a nickle for it, you were expected to write everyone at
    the chewing gum factory a personalized thank-you letter out of common
    courtesy?  Is this any way to run a civilization?  Why can't we in the
    electronic world do what has worked since prehistoric times in the real
    world?  Why can't we simply develop a form of electronic currency (call
    it info-dollars or whatever) that can then be used as a form of exchange
    for our electronic materials?  Take another look at note 1024.

				   -davo

p.s.	Please and thank-you.  ;^)

    re: .6
    
    Even if your plan was implemented, a "thank you" would still be in
    order, IMHO.  If someone goes out of their way to do extra for you --
    even if they get some type of fictional monetary compensation -- a
    "thank you" is still good business.
    
    I get a BIG kick out of helping someone in trouble who comes back with
    a "thank you" that you know they mean.  Does it pay the bills?  No.  I
    need real bucks for that, but some human beings like me need more than
    just money to feel that they have value in the world.  A heartfelt "thank
    you" can keep a person like me riding very high for some time.
    
    I once worked at a place who had a high-level manager who reportedly
    believed that "no thanks are necessary when you are paid to do the
    job".  I will _never_ work for _anyone_ with such an attitude if I can
    possibly avoid it.
    
    I designed and wrote (or, more precisely, "hacked"... ;^) an
    interactive NEWS system for my district.  In the eight months or so
    that I've operated it, I've gotten maybe 6-8 "thank you"s for providing
    the service.  In place of the "thank you"s, I've resorted to tracking
    usage statistics.  The fact that over 7000 articles have been read by
    my coworkers means that my work is significant, and they are likely
    just too busy to say thanks.  Would I do it for "funny money"
    or some other thing?  I think not.  It would reduce a pleasure to the
    level of "just another job".  I've got enough to do, thanks.  I do what
    I do so that others may profit from it -- not so I can "rack up the
    points".
    
    Give me the "thank you"s any day.  Keep the funny money for yourself.
    
    -- Russ

    
>    Give me the "thank you"s any day.  Keep the funny money for yourself.
    
THANK YOU Russ!  Well said.....

- George

    You're welcome, George!
    
    -- Russ

    
    Re .6:
    				davo-*BOOM*
    

re: .7,

	You're right that "Thank you's" are a helpful and necessary part
    of the business world, and I never said they weren't.  What I said
    was that to attempt to use nothing but "Thank you's" as a form of
    currency in a business world would lead to complete and utter chaos!

	That is exactly how we are attempting to carry on our everyday
    business in the network notesfiles, and I don't think it is working.
    Maybe in a smaller, cozier environment (say for example an extended
    family situation, or maybe when DEC was a smaller company and everybody
    knew each other), then it might work, but when you start dealing in large
    interstate (much less international) groups of people trying to all
    work together however, the "Thank you" currency breaks down.  It becomes
    highly impractical for everybody in the corporation to try and thank
    each other personally for every little thing that each of us will
    contribute towards building a computerized civilization.

	Measuring the level of appreciation for a given product or service
    is extremely difficult.  This is why currency exists because in the highly
    complex world in which we live, currency is the only practical means of
    measuring such things.  Even you admitted that you had to go and gather
    some statistics on the actual usage of your software to make you feel a
    little better about having done the work. 

	So what's so bad about a system which would automatically gather
    statistics on how many people utilize a given piece of information? 
    That's all that the underlying framework of an info-market would really
    do.  An info-dollar exchanged for a given piece of information in the
    notesfiles would simply mean that someone felt strongly enough about a
    given piece of information that they were willing to invest one of their
    own hard-earned info-dollars in the producer of that information.

				    -davo

Davo, you miss my point. I'm not saying that if someone does you a favor you
need to spend the rest of your life writing formal thank you notes. If typing
"reply" to the mail prompt and the word "thanks" for a message and hitting a
control-z is going to take 90% of your time (even a hunt and peck typist can
do that in under a minute), then I wonder why you are in a job that you can do
so little of that it is going to take 90% of your time just thanking the
people that are doing your work for you.

Think about it; if you walked into the next cube and asked someone a question
about how to do something or use something, and they took the time to answer
or demonstrate it to you, wouldn't you verbally say "thank you" as you were
leaving the cube? Why is asking a favor over the network (and of someone that
you don't even know) that different? 

In 991 we see that because someone at corporate didn't help someone in the
field in the manner he wanted, a complaint got filed with KO. Yet on the
other hand, a lot of folks at corporate are pretty good about giving answers
through the back-door. Rarely to the field folks reply with a "thanks for the
info" (I'd say about 1 out of 10 will). And I'm not talking about a "thank 
you" to my manager; I'm just talking about a simple mail reply that says "I
got your mail and your suggestion works/helps. Thanks for your time". 

Deb                           

    
    re: .11
    
    My favors or extra effort are not for sale, but are given freely. 
    
    Yes, I appreciate a thank you from the receiver of my efforts, but I
    would not put out that extra effort for bogus bucks.
    
    Ray
    
      
    
      

re: a lack of 'thank you's

In most NOTES conferences, 'thank you' replies are, shall we say 'discouraged'.
I wonder if this is carrying over into peoples mail habits?

Bob

re .14

When someone gives me an answer in NOTES, I send them a thanks in mail -- of
course, if their fix doesn't work, I'll send them mail, too! ;-)

Davo -- I replied in 1024 about my feelings about charging internally for
information. No way. No how. Never ever. I agree that people should be rewarded
according to their contributions to Digital. But if you think we behave funny
because of metrics, imagine a new metric with MONEY (real OR imagined) attached
to it! I don't think your method will give you the solution you think it will.

Cross charging for internal information would be like playing the trumpets at
Jericho -- and being at the wrong end.


/Peters

    Re: the previous (and a taste of 1024 for Davo) - 
    
    I keep a mail folder called ATTABOYS into which I cast a copy of any
    reasonably polite acknowledgement of my efforts. This gives me personal
    satisfaction (in the good years) when I review it, and it gives me
    economic satisfaction when I include a dump of this folder in the
    backup data for my performance reviews. Does it get me more $$ ? I
    doubt it (I'm starting to have a mystic belief that ALL salaries in the
    corporation are set by a bounded random-number process running on a
    PDP-8 in the sub-basement of the Mill), but it DOES give my boss backup
    information to fight for that extra .001% for me, should such crumbs
    become available.
    
    Info-currency in Digital exists. It's called (alternately) the
    old-person network or personal networking. If I help you, you help me,
    or each of us helps another and so on...But thank the clock tower that
    nobody's keeping corporate score, or the whole thing would lock up its
    wheels and freeze out.
    
    And yes, I would love to have more thank-yous for what I do (when I do
    good), above and beyond "just the normal job". 

    
     My current CUSTOMER has given me and my partner more attaboys and
    cudos than our current employer. Kind of hard to swallow, we see
    the stick but no carrot from digital. We review our folders to feel
    good. The customer is happy, we should be too. BTW some attaboys have
    made it up to our managers, we never heard of a response or ack back.
    
    -Mike Z.

     one aw shot= 10 at_a_boy's..
    
    
    
    buz

    re .18
    
    Horse puckies!!!
    
    One aw shot IS GREATER THAN 10K attaboys
    
    Jon_from_too_many_personal_experiences