Just had a lovely evening of conversation with a friend.

She’s in Internet Marketing and has recently started operating her business based on gifts and gratitude; giving things away to those who need them rather than setting a fixed price for services, and letting folks contribute as they will. 

Even though we’re coming at all this from totally different directions, we’re on the same page about a lot. Like how alienating society can be and how detrimental our focus on monetary gain as an end of itself can be. How important getting in touch with our humanity is, and how necessary it is to give everyone the opportunity to have their needs (and wants!) met.

I had mentioned to her that I’d love to get paid for writing again, and she asked me more about that. She said she’d love to read a book or article series about how to make working in the customer service industry more humanizing, and would love to help promote it. That she could post such writing on websites that get traffic from business people that might be interested in how to re-work their strategies for dealing with employees, and that we could find people in jobs like mine and see who’d be interested in reading and maybe funding a project like that.

I’ve already put some ideas on a blog, and things totally come up at work all the time I could write about.

Like today, it was frustrating to me again how much companies want to push all the responsibility back on the customer for everything. How people are calling in asking me to explain things to them and all I can do is direct them back to the resources they can already read and probably have read and tell them it was their job to figure it out. And that sucks. But they haven’t taught me enough to really be able to educate people on my own without help, either. They do have a lot of resources available, but how comprehensible are they? Everyone just gets the run-around.

So how could we do it differently?

I could totally get excited (and already am) about a newsletter project that would give people tips about how to work within regulations to bring more humanity into their customer service positions, that would point out to CEOs and managers the places their current policies are lacking, that would invite people to share their own stories and insights or ask for help. That would offer workshops or yoga classes or provide opportunities for role-playing scenarios that could make customer service jobs serve the customer a little better and feel a little more natural and human….

I could go on and on.

And then she asked me how much money I would need to live.

And if even 300 people would contribute $5 a month to a project like that, that would be enough. Millions of people work in this industry and all I need is 300 on board to do what I’ve dreamed of doing for the last six months at least.

I could revolutionize the customer service industry.

Not alone, of course. But we could get started and get people to come on board.

It seems doable now.

I couldn’t manage it alone but I don’t have to.

Here is this wonderful person with means and connections and experience who is willing to work with me to create something to improve a lot of people’s lives – including mine.

And it’s wonderful.

I’m abuzz with energy and giddy with excitement and the possibility of it all is truly wonderful.

Maybe the key is just doing what you want, for real.

Just do it and let people who are excited too come along for the ride.