Public servants deliver great customer service

Friday night, Myles and I arrived at our ski house around 10 PM.  This was several hours later than our usual arrival time as his third grade basketball team had the honor of playing during the half time of the Brookline vs. Wellesley High School game.    The good news was that leaving at 8 meant very little traffic and we made the drive without delay.  The bad news was we heard a beeping noise when we entered our home.  It sounded like a smoke detector in need of a fresh battery, so I headed to the check the usual suspect on our second floor.  To my surprise the noise was coming from a box on the wall I had never paid much attention to. Turns out it was the CO2 monitor and the indicator light was blinking yellow.  Not realizing how dangerous a CO2 leak could be (until my wife explained it to me in no uncertain terms a few minutes later), I casually pushed the reset button and the noise stopped. At least for a few minutes until it was replaced by the shriek of the alarm, which sent Myles running outside and dispatched a couple of fire engines to our home.

Within minutes, Andrew Vermeersch, Adam Trayner and Brendon Oriordan arrived at our house, happy to see the two of us out front and no one passed out inside,  They proceeded to enter the house and check all levels with their hand held CO2 detector.  Finding nothing, they concluded the false positive alarm was caused by a faulty detector.

The fact that the officers were incredibly nice and friendly despite being called out in zero degree weather at 10 pm on a Friday night was impressive, but what happened next really impressed us.  In addition to checking the air and the alarm, they went on to check for a weak battery in the CO2 detector and even replaced a wall anchor when the mounting screws came out, checked all of our smoke detectors and replaced a battery in one, and finally politely asked if they could see the rest of the house.  This request was so they would know out layout if there ever was a real fire emergency, they would know how to get around and where we might be sleeping or trapped to facilitate a rescue.

Myles and I both thanked them for their help and I asked if we could pay them for their trouble, or make a contribution to the fire department.  They replied, “No, just tell our chief we did a good job.”  So, to Waterville Valley, New Hampshire’s Chief of Police Dave Noise and Fire Chief Chris Hodges, your guys did a GREAT job!

A tribute to the orignial Collaboration Evangelist

On the Monday before Thanksgiving my father, Cecil H. Underwood,  passed away.  The date was November 24^th, nineteen days after his 86^th birthday and twenty days after Barrack Obama was elected President.   My father was born two days before Election Day in 1922, elected the youngest Governor of West Virginia two days after he turned 34 and elected the state’s oldest Governor on his 74^th birthday.  In my post, Why a Collaboration Evangelist, I wrote:

Perhaps it’s a “nature and nurture” thing, as I have always been a strong believer that teams of smart people with diverse backgrounds and points of view will always have a better chance of solving challenging problems and finding new opportunities to add value to any enterprise than the model where “one smart guy solves all the problems and makes all the decisions.”

From the nature side, I was born the day after my father was inaugurated as the 25^th governor of the State of West Virginia at the age of 34.  One of the things he told me about that campaign was although they had only one paid staffer – his driver – the campaign was supported by 3000 volunteers. The campaign put all of their efforts into organizing and energizing their volunteer network to register and get supporters to the polls.  They spent the money they raised on the new technology of the day called TV advertising.  This strategy enabled him to become the first Republican governor in 25 years in a state where Democratic voters outnumbered Republicans   by 2.5 to 1.

The many papers around the world that carried the news of my father’s death described him as “a high school teacher who became a governor.”  While it is true that he started his career as a high school biology teacher and his last formal employment was as a Drinko Scholar at Marshall University, my father was always quietly teaching through his actions to those of us who had the good fortune to know and work with him. At his memorial service, I remembered my father by sharing some of the lessons he taught us by the way he lived and the way he led.  These included:

1. No obstacle is too high to overcome if you believe in yourself and are willing to work very hard to achieve your goals.

My father took on monumental challenges from the beginning of his career.  At the age of 22, he challenged a long standing incumbent to win the first of six terms to the State Legislature.  Twelve years later he was elected Governor.  But at the end of his first term he lost a race for the US Senate (at that time, Governors could not run for re-election) and over the next 36 years he ran unsuccessfully for Governor three times.

During this period, I remember thinking that maybe my father had “peaked too soon” at the age of 34, like an NBA team playing their best ball before the playoffs.   He showed me otherwise in 1996 when he was elected the State’s 32^nd Governor.  During his second administration, more jobs were created, more roads were built and more school children and seniors were connected to the internet than during any other four year period in the history of West Virginia.

As I admired his work ethic and the successes of his second term, I thought he was the greatest role model for working hard and beating the odds that anyone could ever have.  But again I was wrong. Not wrong in the role model, but wrong in the act.

The most amazing thing I saw my father do was to come back from a paralyzing stroke he suffered in 2006 at the age of 83.  The entire left side of his body was paralyzed with the exception of his fingers, which he could move slightly if he wasn’t too tired.  At his discharge planning meeting a few months later, my sisters and I told Dad he needed to move to an assisted living facility to continue his rehabilitation.  He was none too happy with our proclamation and wanted to know what he had to do to live at home again. We told him he needed to be able to walk.

So, for the next three months, he did 5 hours of physical therapy a day – riding the stationary bike, lifting weights and doing anything else the PT staff at Charleston Gardens told him to do.  His efforts were rewarded as he indeed did walk again and was selected “Stroke Recovery Patient of the Year.” More importantly, he was able to return home for several years.

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