After expounding last week on people and companies who don’t do things they’re expected to do, I was immediately guilty of the same thing. Oops.

I should clarify a bit. What I was talking about last week was someone not doing a task expected of them simply because they couldn’t be bothered with it. Someone just deciding to skip it with a “they’ll-get-over-it” attitude. I find that to be incredibly unprofessional, and possibly something that’s at least partially at the root of our current troubled economy.

I’m expected to produce a blog every Tuesday and Friday unless something gets in the way of it being posted – holidays, staff vacations or outages, busy times when trade shows call for lots of travel, etc. But when it came time to do a blog for this past Friday, I didn’t. I had planned to, but needed to take care of some doctor-related stuff. The trip took much longer than expected for a variety of reasons, and when I finally got back home it was well into the second half of the day. I wasn’t home more than a few minutes when a call from the doctor regarding a billing issue meant I had to throw my coat back on and go right out again to take care of it. By the time I’d finally made it back home it was too late to get the blog written, and then file it in time to get it posted before the weekend.

Meeting deadlines is what my career is all about. If you run a pro shop, I suspect the same holds true for you. Not delivering on time bothers me tremendously, even though in this case it couldn’t be helped. Could I have simply done the blog earlier in the day? Sure, but my plan was to get the doctor visit out of the way first, and then do it. Of course, I had no idea the day would turn into a total time sink. Missing a blog isn’t a huge deal in the scheme of things, but it still bothers me.

And that, I think, is the key. It was only a simple woodworking blog, but I take that as seriously as anything else I do. Circumstances beyond my control made me miss it. However, it wasn’t a decision to just skip it because I didn’t feel like doing it. That, too often, seems to be the attitude today. And, even though I dropped the ball to a small degree – and am embarrassed by it – I stand my ground with what I said in last week’s blog.

A.J.