Humility & Humidity
- Post By: Greg Crumpton
- Date:
- Category: Blog
These are two words that really do not have much to do with one another. Humility is being humbled, realizing you are human, or realizing that your piece of the world is just that… a small piece of a much larger pie. Humidity, that sticky, steamy, aggravating element of a Southern summer is considered “Man’s Best Friend” by HVAC contractors. It’s what keeps our technicians busy, our production crew humming and our bankers happy.
Over the last couple of weeks I came to realize that I had really screwed up, as in a five-figure kind of screw up, on a job proposal. “What to do? What to do?”, were the only words that kept popping up in my brain.
Thinking about having to sit down with a group of 10 people, some you know very well, some you know pretty well and some of whom you just met, and tell them that you screwed up is very uncomfortable. Who wouldn’t want to try and avoid that? But, after weighing out all options and considering about 2,017 different scenarios, that was the route I chose to take.
Meanwhile, mother nature had decided that Charlotte was due for some mid-year relief, so she turned off the summer, and along with it the humidity, for about a week. That’s never a good thing either. We have 37 or so families to feed, we have girl scout camps to pay for, we have vacations to enjoy before school starts back, how can we be wearing a light sweater on a July evening?
Internally within AirTight, our projects team debated on ways to over-come my error. We had conversations with our friendly sub-contractors, engineers and even the owner of this unique project. Finally we had all parties come together for a face-to-face meeting.
This was the moment of truth.
No, it wasn’t anywhere close to fun.
Yes, it put our customer in a bad place.
No, we were not even close to thinking about walking away, although it had been within one of the above referenced 2,017 scenarios. It wasn’t the right thing to do, it rarely is, so we decided to stay the course.
Through the grace of our customer, the flexibility of our sub-contractors and the wise counsel of many, we came to a solution. It’s certainly not a perfect outcome, many people have gone out of their way to help accommodate an error that was just that.
I can list a dozen reasons why the error occurred. But, guess what? No one cares.
The most awesome part of this lesson is that if you partner with the right people and try to do what is best for all, most times things will work out in a favorable way for everyone.
Is this a new lesson learned? Absolutely not.
Is it one of the all-time, best-ever lessons reiterated? You bet.
The meeting was over. As I was walking out of the building, headed to the car, I suddenly realized that Mother Nature had indeed returned the “proper level” of humidity to the air. It was hot and my forehead was beaded-up with sweat.
This triggered the thought that humility, and not humidity, may really be “Mans Best Friend”, not only as a contractor, but as a human.
