Separating Contacts by New Age and Dark Ages

One interesting thing I did during my recent switch from Outlook 2003 to Thunderbird was to also go through all my email contacts. Anyone who had never sent me an email or replied to an email of mine in the past few years, or who did so traditionally late (like months later), I deleted their email address and made a separate address book for them called “Phone Only”. I have no idea what is with these people. They either hate me and have no spine to say so, or maybe they get an email address and have no clue how to use it. I’m not talking about people with wrong email addresses or mailbox full folks. Some of them actually used to be pretty good friends.

Telephone as a “Satisfaction” Driver

When I worked at Allstate, my first job in the insurance industry, they published something called the Agency Service Standards. Yes, we all made fun of the acronym, too. Anyway, the idea was to publish a set of guidelines that would create a sense of uniformity for customers should they visit different agencies. Like all good ideas, it eventually turned into a bureaucratic monster and we all half-expected them to tell us which way to part our hair.