Intergrity, rants and thoughts

In a recent interview I was told, "Integrity is the easy part". My response was a short uncomfortable laugh while I shot this woman a glance that said, "Are you freaking kidding me?" I work hard every day to maintain my integrity and I find it a difficult but rewarding task. "Is this woman a superwoman who doesn't have trouble with integrity," I wondered to myself. Then, of course, I learned this came from the woman who said she would call the next day to let me know whether I got the job or not and never called - or hasn't called to this date, a good week and a half after she said she'd call.

Then there is this story: a good friend of mine went to a store that personalizes gifts through engraving or embroidery. My friend purchased journals and took them to the store. She asked that the store engrave the name of person to whom she is giving the journal on a small plaque in the lower right hand corner of the front cover. She had four of these journals. On a fifth journal she asked for something slightly different. When she came back to the store a week later to pick up her journals, she found that the first four journals had been done in the style she had requested only for the last journal. The sales representative did not apologize for the mistake but eventually explained to my friend how the problem could be fixed. My friend was unhappy but was willing to wait another week to get something closer to what she asked for. A week later, she goes back to the store to find that the journals look identical to how they did the first time. The store did nothing to correct the mistakes. This time when my friend asked them to correct the mistakes or give her a discount, the store refused. Not only did they refuse to correct the mistake, they told my friend that it was her fault that the mistakes occurred. When my friend seemed unhappy with this, the store offered to correct the mistakes for an addition charge per item. Of course, it would take yet another couple days to get the product. My friend doesn't have the time to wait. She's already given them 2 weeks. Why did they offer to make the changes the first time the problem was pointed out if they weren't going to make the changes? When they decided not to make the changes, why didn't the store call my friend and tell her? The moral of this story - DO NOT shop at the store "Hands off it's Mine" in the Claremont Village, they have no integrity.

Integrity sounds easy. It's simple - just do what you say you will do, be on time or call if you're going to be late, it's mostly common courtesy type things. However, with as often as many of us are unable to keep our word (and I'm sure I've been known to break my word) ... maybe integrity is harder than it seems ... or maybe too many of us, like the employer, take integrity for granted.

I'm sure most of us intend to do what we say we will do. Sometimes it's just hard to do what we said we would do. Calling someone to tell them the job was given to someone else or that the changes one promised to make are not going to be made is not a fun task.

When I think of integrity, I often think of Phoebe from the TV show Friends. (Of course, a lot of things remind me of Friends, but that's another point altogether.) Early in the show, Phoebe is asked if she would like to do some work with the guys. Her response, "Oh, I wish I could but I don't want to". While I laugh because this is rude, every time I have the same thought: "What refreshing honesty!" Maybe there's a lesson we can all learn from Phoebe. The lesson is this: while we may sometimes feel or even be rude in order to keep our integrity everyone benefits more from the integrity rather than the lie that occurs, even unintentionally, from losing it.