I took the car in for a regular service, and asked them about a wind noise. When I got the bill they said it would cost $160 to replace glass and a seal, and by the way, that will be $112 to tell you that.

That seemed a tad excessive. But what can I do? It is the car dealer and aside from engaging in a lot of caterwauling that at the best case could save me $112 there really isn't much to do other than pay the man.

Pay the man and learn the lesson. I presented myself at the dealer and asked them to deal with my problem. Please take this problem and make it your own. And they did, for $112.

They didn't internalize the issues with my car. They didn't worry that they were not smart enough to have accomplished the task more quickly. They didn't own confusion, angst, pain, guilt.

They just said 'sure, we will look at it' and then they did, and told me to pay the man $112.

I've too often internalized the needs of my clients in an unhealthy way. Solve problems? Sure. Work hard to figure things out? Also fine. But there is no cause to turn 'your' problem that needs to be solved into a source of pain for me. It doesn't get your task addressed any quicker, or better. It just makes me feel like crap.

Right now I have a bunch of bulk geocoding requests that bother me. They bother me because the data is, well, not optimal. And I don't get good results when I start with dicey data.

And I feel bad about that.

A bit ago I got a bulk request. About 500 records. I was only able to code about 95 of them. I replied to the customer that the results were crap, and there would be no charge. I felt bad about it. He replied that he only sent me the records that had failed to geocode in their expensive commercial geocoding application, so our results were impressive.