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December 18, 2006
Moods can be viruses
I broke my glasses last week. Poof, one arm snapped off. Since I was on the road, I had to wear glasses that featured an ugly torniquet of clear tape for a few days. Yech.
Back home, I called the store where I bought my glasses to order a replacement arm.
A replacement would take a few days, a clerk told me. Was there anything she could do to help in the meantime, I asked. No problem, she said with confidence. She could take the arm of a sample pair and put it on my broken pair to use for the weekend. Excellent! She was my hero.
I drove to the store. My hero clerk was there. A different clerk asked with an accusatory air why I didn't have a back-up pair of glasses. The mood inside the store grew dark, and now my hero clerk had a choice to make: Quietly assume command of the situation and continue to be my hero, or follow the lead of her compatriot and pile blame on me for my problem. It's the same, split-second choice millions of employees make every day. What's the more beneficial decision: supporting my compatriots whom I see every day, or the lone customer with the problem?
Moods are viruses, and my hero clerk was quickly infected: "It is against our policy to loan you this sample arm, and we will only do this this one time," she said. On her own, the hero-clerk's intuition was to go beyond the norm. But the dark matter of mood was too much. It often is.
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