September 25, 2009
It never fails…
We have a long-standing joke around Borshoff — the way to awaken a client that has gone quiet for a while is to remove them from the workload chart. Each week, the account staff all report how many hours they think they’ll spend on each client; after many weeks or months of reporting zero hours for a client, there’s discussion of “Should we take them off the chart?” And it almost never fails — the moment you hit Ctrl-X, the phone rings or the e-mail chimes and it is that very client, calling with a statewide advertising plan, or 16 brochures, or whatever.
I had a similar experience this afternoon. A couple of days ago, with a few moments to spare, I started cleaning out my Outlook Contact list. One person I deleted was a development officer for an Indy museum. I had lunch with him probably five years ago, as he tried to persuade me that my clients’ sponsorship dollars would be well-spent supporting one of their exhibits. I let him buy me an inexpensive lunch at his museum’s cafe and then told him that my clients had no sponsorship dollars. (But I did later share his contact info and exhibit roster with all my colleagues.)
So, Tuesday or Wednesday, I came across his name and decided to delete him from my address book.
Imagine my surprise today when the elevator doors opened on my floor today and there he was, coming down from a meeting somewhere above the 4th floor!
