It Always Pays to Care

Imagining that email you just sent scrawled all over your State’s newspaper – front page... just think about that before you click “send”.

I was most surprised to read the following out-of-office auto-reply to a recent message I sent via email. It read:

“From Good Friday, 1 October 2010, I am out of this office forever. Thanks for your communication but please refer the matter to someone who continues to care, such as... [name]”

It was even more surprising to me that the person this message had come from had previously held quite a respectable office, but in the tone of this auto-reply they’d perhaps lose every semblance of credibility with the unsuspecting reader.

Why do we burn our bridges? We are never to tell when we might want to cross back over.

Whether we like it or not, any hint of not caring about things rebounds back into our court with monotonous regularity, to which we’re quickly caught out-of-bounds.

Those who insist on making ‘their statement’ will find it comes at a great cost, and a remorseful attempt at a reversal will come too late. The damage will already have been done.

It is bad enough to make an innocent mistake with email; how much worse when completed with malicious intent?

There is a great deal of wisdom and potential for face-saving in checking not only content but motive before we click the “send” or “save” buttons. Better to be humble and honest about our resentment-producing hurts before the regretful event than remorseful afterwards.

Whenever we choose to expel our responsibility to care in life we also choose to cast our destiny upon the devil. It will not end well from there.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.