Welcome to The Fordyce Letter:
Last week I went to pay some bills online. I looked at my account and realized there were charges listed that I had never made. I called the bank immediately. We shut down all of my accounts and opened new ones.
I went to the bank ten business days later, and I still did not have a functioning ATM card. That meant that rather than simply go to an ATM for cash, I had to wait in a long, long line at the bank for a teller. Twenty minutes later, by the time I got to the head of the line, I was seriously annoyed. I expressed my annoyance to the teller. Her response? “Calm down, Ma’am.”
So my dear readers, do you think this response calmed me down?
Of course not. It had exactly the opposite effect. I went through the roof. “Don’t tell me to calm down,” I snarled. Where before I had simply been annoyed, now I was really angry.
So why am I sharing my banking woes?
“Fee? I never agreed to pay a fee to hire anyone!”
Like most top performing recruiters, I’m a multi-tasker. When I’m in the office, no matter what I’m doing, I like to have the radio on in the background. I fall asleep to the television and I always have music playing in the car even when I’m on the phone. My husband is the opposite. He turns the radio off when he receives a phone call and mutes the television while he has a conversation. He can’t stand having what some people call “white noise” in the background. He wants to focus on one thing at a time without interruption.
Two or three times a month we get a call from a person who wants to leave their job primarily because the counteroffer that he or she agreed to three or four months earlier had, agonizingly, not worked out. Their approach is usually accompanied by an attitude of anger, disappointment, and disgust that they are back looking for a job with more determination than ever. The perceived promises in the counteroffer they accepted didn’t materialize and they are really committed to leaving their job . . . this time.
I have qualified for my company’s Performance Forum trip nine years out of ten that I have worked there. For the last five years, it has become tradition that I perform a LIVE rap with the band on awards night. Unfortunately, this year, I won but was unable to attend, so I did what I do best and still made sure my tradition lived on: I created a rap video. I was very fortunate to have a wonderful staff of teammates to help me act, shoot, and complete the video on time.
I was going to write about recruiting for retention, but then I got sidetracked. The NCAA tournament starts today, and I have done my research for my basketball pool at the office. Last year, I entered two brackets; a first in 
Thirty six years ago, I was an accountant. Happily or unhappily, as the case may be, putting lots of numbers into lots of big black books. Yes, they were big black books. Edison had invented the light bulb but Microsoft was some kind of fabric that kept small children and big dogs from making a mess on pillows . Being not too long out of a divorce I was focused on talking on the phone to discover what was going on with the rest of the world of newly divorced people — planning where and what time the “young and the restless” were going to solve the problems of the world that night. In a fit of pique, my boss walked by my office and uttered the now infamous words, “Why don’t you go find a job where you can do what you do best…talk on the phone.”
