I reply in the affirmative and he says, “You might not remember me, but I’m Lance. You helped me work on my computer at the beginning of the year.”

“Is it still working?”

“Yep.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Thank you. I really appreciated your help.”

It’s good to know that people remember when you’ve helped them out. So next time you see someone who did something for you, stop and thank them. It will probably brighten their day.

Take my job in tech support as an example. At the beginning of the school year there is always a rush of people needing help. It is not uncommon during the first few weeks for me to be trying to help seven people at one time. When confronted with this situation, most customers are helpful and wait for you to get to them. Some, however, demand that you do what they need right now.

What such an attitude fails to consider is that by helping them, I may not be doing the best thing overall. Say their problem is a bit of a puzzler, while the other six people have simple issues. For the sake of the argument, let’s quantify the situation. If six simple problems take 20 minutes to fix all of them, and the difficult problem also takes 20, I can either:

• Work on the difficult problem first. This way the person with the difficult problem is there 20 minutes total and everyone else is there 40 (20 while they wait, and 20 while I work on them). Total time waited by everyone thus adds up to 260 minutes (20*1 + 40*6).

or

• Work on the simple problems first. Thus six people are done in 20 minutes and the person with the difficult problem is there 40 minutes. Total time is now 160 minutes (20*6 + 40*1).

From the numbers alone (260 vs. 160), we can see it is more efficient (to the tune of 100 minutes) to help the people with simple problems first. Of course, not everything can be reduced to numbers, and the example demands ceteris paribus, but I think the point is clear.

The difficulty is one of scope of vision. When we are the ones with the problem, we rarely look at the whole picture. Often the other person involved has a better overview of the situation and knows what’s best. Why do we not listen to them?

Because we are at heart selfish creatures.* Not that this is inherently bad—according to neoclassical economics it is self-interest that makes the world go round—but it is worth remembering. Sometimes we should learn to step back and consider the whole situation; you may be helping more than just yourself. (Or, at the very least, you’ll make some poor service person’s life a little brighter.)

*I realize that this statement leads to another whole debate. For the moment, I’m just going to ignore that and conclude my post.