This past month I had a little communication mishap.  To make a very long story short I was trying to get in contact with a client’s IT department about giving me access to the web server so I could do some work on their website. For the past few weeks I’ve been emailing and calling them (but not getting an answering machine), to see if they had granted me access. I never received any emails back, no phone calls, no nothing. To make matters worse my client has been on vacation and couldn’t be reached.

It was very frustrating and really seemed like this IT person was purposely ignoring me. When my client came back from vacation I let him know what was going on without causing alarm. He gave me a different number for his IT guy. When I called it, Jack, who I had been trying to reach picked up. Come to find out the number I had been calling was his office phone and it wasn’t redirecting properly to his cell phone. And for my emails? He checked the spam box on the server. They were all in there.

Before I had talked to Jack my first reaction was that he was ignoring me. All sorts of thoughts bounced through my head. “He is ignoring me on purpose”, “He is busy”, “He is mad and trying to make me look bad because he no longer takes care of the site” I don’t know but none of the thoughts were doing anything productive for me. That’s when I realized until I get a hold of Jack I should stop worrying about it.

I could have riled up my client, blown up at Jack, and turned this into a huge mess. But it wouldn’t have help any of us. That is why it is better to find out the facts before you act. Once my client found out what had happened, he wasn’t mad, he was just happy we were moving forward. So the next time a situation seems to bad from your end, take sometime to find out what is going on on the other end before making any judgement.