Don't Let Your Mouth Write a Check Your Work Ethic Can't Cash

I have a secret confession: I like workaholics. To be sure, I complain constantly about their incessant emails and phone calls; how they always have a new idea, new project, or some other fresh hell in which to enmesh me. I am surrounded by workaholics at work and at play. The people I volunteer with seem to be driven by obsession; my work colleagues send emails at all hours. But blast it all, those crazies make me better. Push me harder. And make sure I am never bored. When my Facebook friends can't find anything good to post, Twitter is quiet and Gmail is a grayed-out graveyard of read emails, I can always count on my workaholic colleagues to keep things jumping with calendar requests that I will pretend I didn't see and tersely worded missives about passing deadlines (I send most of those, but whatever). Sometimes I feel like my job is like the final weeks of a political campaign all the time -- there is always an emergency, we never stop working, we are supposed to look and act professionally while being tired, hungry and loopy, and we really think we are going to change our corner of the world. There is an essence in that kind of environment that carries an energy all its own. It is difficult to convey, but it is real.

How-and-the-ever, please please please do not fake the funk. Because acting as a developer gives me lots of opportunities to hire consultants, I am constantly bombarded with people who do a lot of jaw-jacking about all the work they do when they should be using that energy doing the work. There are a lot of big talkers in the real estate industry, like in any other. I have a contractor who constantly tells me that he can move faster getting the work done than I can get approval for it. Unproven. His work is beautiful, but he dilly dallies in getting me estimates and puts the wrong address on his invoice (let me tell you something, if I were lucky enough to be able to invoice someone for something you had best believe that my mailing address would be correct). There are other contractors who promise the moon but can't seem to locate pictures of their work or references. Bureaucrats who need that paperwork now(!!) only to use it to provide adequate pillow stuffing and inspectors who dazzle me with jargon and long histories of their storied careers; then I get the report and it's WRONG.

Sigh. I am not a tough customer. I dole out the benefit of the doubt long before it is earned. True, I am an email refresher and a follow-up caller. I might also send an email to follow up on my phone call because WHERE ARE YOU WE ARE CLOSING TODAY. In my defense, the better our consultants perform, the better we look and everyone goes home happy. So understand, if you tell me you are the bomb, I will be expecting explosions. Don't let your mouth write a check that your work ethic can't cash.