April 21, 2006

Two Stories

I lost my glasses Sunday while photographing flowers at a private "pay to enter" arboretum. Now the whole world is out of focus.

Monday afternoon, after 1,200 committees, 732 e-mails, and no lunch, I went back to ask if any glasses had been turned in to the arboretum's lost and found. I arrived at 5:05pm and there was no one at the desk.

"Hallo..." I called hopefully. A well-dressed arboretum employee came around a corner and asked, "what?"

"I lost my glasses here yesterday and wonder if they might have been turned in today," I ventured with much humility and a hint of urgency.

"What kind of glasses?"

I stumbled out an answer trying to say "thin, plastic and wire, trifocals, nearly weightless, fogged, and essential." I don't think I did a very good job, never having thought about how to describe my glasses.

"Only reading glasses were turned in today."

I waited, hoping to hear an offer of help, or at least a feigned condolence. The employee's frosty gaze included neither.

"May I walk out to the place where I think I left them?" I tried to sound certain of the location and professional enough to be trusted alone in the garden.

"We're closed."

"It'll just take a minute. The place is nearby."

"We're closed."

That was it. Over. Done. Conversation complete. Case closed.

I walked away cataloging a hundred ways I could have been treated as a human, trying to decide whether to be angry or morose. Then I remembered Nancy's story, and I smiled.

Nancy answered her PFS phone in the Emergency Room last Thursday and heard a woman crying. "I must find Lionel," the caller sobbed. "He helped me."

Turns out that the caller and her husband had come to the ED by ambulance two days earlier where her husband had received "the best treatment we could have hoped for." Unfortunately, our care team had not been able to save the husband's life and late that evening she had stood alone at the ED desk talking with the tech who had helped them through the emergency.

"I have never driven a car," she told Lionel, "and I'm afraid I don't know how to get home. Could you please call me a cab?"

Lionel called the taxi, and then listened to more of her story. A couple minutes later he cancelled the taxi.

"Ma'am," she remembers him saying. "If you can wait about ten more minutes I'll be off duty and I'd be honored to take you home. Would that be Ok with you?"

Nancy listened as the woman told the story over the phone. "That was the nicest thing anyone has done for me. He didn't have to take me home. I could have gone in the cab, but he cared about me. Please find him and tell him thank you. That was the nicest thing anyone has done for me." Again and again she told Nancy the same thing, "That was the nicest thing anyone has done for me. Please tell him thank you!"

Lionel, like the employee at the arboretum, could have said, "I'm out of here and this is your problem and I really don't care." Instead, at the end of a long traumatic day in the ED, Lionel chose to care, to treat her like a valuable human being.

That's ROLE MODEL CUSTOMER SERVICE. That's what Florida Hospital employees do when we "extend the healing ministry of Christ."


..."Which of these do you think was a neighbor...?" Jesus asked. Luke 10:36

Dick Duerksen
Assistant Vice President
Mission Development
Florida Hospital