Tommy Collison

On Saturday night, as I was returning from BTW in Cork, when I had productivety running through my veins, I wrote an email to one of my internships, just asking for final details about it. I sent it when I got home on midnight, at exactly 00:13.

And so I went to bed. I was tired after my night in the People’s Republic of Cork.

At 00:27, my phone honked. Honk honk. I was just asleep but decided to see who it was. No one texts me at that time of night save for the person I affectionately refer to as ‘my own personal stalker’. I mean that in the nicest way possible, though. Anyway, I look at the screen. It’s my internship guy.

“OK to call now?”

I’m tired, but I need this info, so I quickly text him back, telling him to call away.

A few minutes later, my ringtone chirrups (yes, mine, I made it in GarageBand) and thus follows a 30 minute business call, lasting from about 00:29 to 1am.

As I tweeted (yeah, I do that alot) later, I didn’t find any less quality in our discussion and the outcomes were exactly what I needed to know. If we’d had that 12 hours earlier or later, nothing new would have been gotten.

Now, when I sent that e-mail, I presumed I’d be reading my response when I got in from school on Monday afternoon. I certainly didn’t expect a text 14 minutes later and a call 16 minutes later.

I think that businesses need to learn from this. We got something sorted probably 30 hours earlier than we would’ve normally got it sorted. By sending a text, we’d done that. If I was able to get to sleep earlier and hadn’t noticed that text come in, that’s fine too. However, because I wasn’t doing anything, and because he was free, it just clicked into place perfectly.

In my experience, businesses are too polite in this respect. I mean, it all led from a text – that’s not too imposing. People seem to have a rod in the wrong place about this. Sending a polite text like the one I got isn’t imposing, it’s not stalking, harassing or badgering either.