by Janet Levine
Clichés, I have found, generally turn out to be true. Like the one about the asking the busiest person you know to do the thing you really need to get done. But make sure it is truly a busy person and not just someone who says he or she is busy all the time.
Those people are all too busy telling you how busy they are to get even their things done, let alone yours. They are the same people, I’ve noticed, whose problems are bigger than yours, and whose successes overshadow yours by a mile. Everything about them tends to be bigger, better, more important.
That’s irritating enough when it is true. But in my experience, their hangnail is far more grievous than your amputation and the fact that they have to meet someone for dinner trumps your needing to feed 15 people.
It’s their self-importance—and by definition your unimportance that really grates. Recently, I asked a client to approve a blurb. A 238-word blurb. He informed three days later via email that he was too busy to read the blurb. It took him 2,779 words to tell me how busy he was and why his busy-ness made it impossible for him to read my blurb and approve it (or not).
Is it just me or can you see how reading the blurb would have HAD to taken less time than writing his busy missive? And why did he think that I would have the time to read all of his 2,779 words? But then, to those people, the rest of us are always chopped liver.
