Taking the blame

I was late to work. I had missed my first alarm at 06.30 A.M or rather got up and stopped it. I had to hurry up with my breakfast and ended up at my workplace at quarter-past-nine, with a few eyeballs , toggling between me and the big clock directly above my seat. I heard the alarm bell giving one of those sarcastic rings. I thought it was my late realisation, but no...It was my desk phone, which was honking.

I picked it up. It was a call from my manager. She told me that the previous day's batch jobs failed. I felt even more culpable because I should have been the first person to be aware of the problem and not my manager. I logged in to my application with those administrative privileges, which I felt was no more a privilege to have.

I sniffed at the problem and it appeared that one of the routers in the intranet had stopped working. Even before I could compose a mail to my manager, there was a business user behind asking me why wasn't he able to view the reports that he sees everyday. He was furious because he had to present the report to his manager within the next 15 minutes. He started complaining about the complete failure of the system to deliver the results.

I asked myself.

"What am I to do now? "How can I explain to him about a router malfunction?" "What should I tell him?"

Then I uttered those words of criminal offence(which I realised later) in a service industry, that I shouldn't have.

"It's not my application's fault, there is some other problem with the network." I said with a sense of pride to reinstate that our application will never fail and also to avoid the user's tongue-lashing.

The user walked away from the scene instantly. I thought I won over him. I later realised that I had won a losing war. He had escalated the issue to my manager about my poor sense of customer service. I was called by my manager for a sudden meeting and there, I was sitting before her apologizing for my behavior.

From that day, I started practicing the art of taking the blames. Two years down, I encountered the same situation, but this time it was my team member who was on the receiving end. And I was on the firing end. I was quite stiff at him because his code had atleast 5 "Priority 1" bugs delaying our "Go-Live" dates.

He approached me and said "Sorry, I take the blame for the delay and I would fix the problem by staying late in office today."

Those words sounded to me like church bells ringing and my displeasure/hostility towards him had disappeared in a second. And I had escalated the same act ("The act of taking the blames") to my manager. Though they were annoyed a bit, they later realised that it was completely humane to commit such mistakes and it was also the first time that such a problem had got picked up in the past 1 year.

The magic words were "I take the blame".

REMEMBER : Customer service levels will drop if you drop the blame.