Thank you for saying thank you!

Part of my job is to answer emails from patrons about our website. Sometimes patrons can be kind of snarky in their emails ("Why does your site do this when I obviously told it to do this other thing?!???!?!?!"), and I take great pleasure in either fixing the problem or writing back and very tactfully explaining what they did wrong. (I take no pleasure when there's nothing I can do about the problem. That just annoys me.)

Yesterday I answered just such an email. I saw immediately what she had done wrong and why it would be confusing. So, in great detail, I explained how each part of the site worked, and even went beyond that and did her search for her, telling her exactly where she could find the data she wanted. It made me feel kind of cool to be able to answer her email in such detail.

Today I got the following reply from her, "That was a FANTASTIC explanation! Thank you for taking time to do all that for me."

It made me smile. Those kind of responses make all the snarky emails totally worth it.

junk mail

Dear Publishers Clearing House ~

Stop sending me your crap. I don't open it, and you're just killing trees.

~ Dragon Lady