Help others to Help yourself

Have you experienced this? you are frustrated that a casher at the supermarket is too slow and causes a long wait line, your email to your manager on an urgent matter is not replied, your community park was littered and no one from city to clean it up … The list can go on and on. Those might all be legit and reasonable. 

One can do something to help with the situations.

At supermarket, one could presort the items on convey belt, separate food from detergent, raw meat from cooked food, items to be scanned from items needs to be weighted .. whatever the case might be, you help the cashers save 20 - 30 seconds. 

At work, your email to your supervisor for approval to purchase a headphone for work from home is not replied for many days. Did you just forward the request for purchase ticket to the supervisor with a comment? If you edit the email title with, e.g. "Request for approval: ….", it should help your supervisor get a clear idea what you need without reading your message, and you get a quick response.

A slow response to your community's issues from your local government might be that they did not know you have problems there as fast as you do from their scheduled check. You can help your city government to solve your community service issues by reporting them through city hotline or website. If you do, you should find out that the service will be provided much faster.

These are examples for what I meant - help others to help you. The following are examples of what I did to help others to help me.

Prevention of Damage to Soaker Hoses 

I lay soaker hoses around my house foundation to prevent the foundation from excessive movement. The issue I had was that my mowing contractor would damage the hoses from time to time.

Despite the fact that the contractor would reimburse me for replacing the damaged hose, it was annoying that the hoses were damaged, especially when I did not notice the damage for a while, and thus soaker hoses did not function as intended.

We communicated to the contractor and ask him to be careful....but they continued to damage the hoses. The annoyance and frustration continued.

So I asked myself what I could do to help the contractor from damaging my soaker hoses when he mows my yard for me. So solution is very simple, we raise the soaker hoses off the ground the night before he came to  mow, and put the hoses back on the ground after the mowing. No more damage to my hoses any more! He mows faster as well because of this.

raising hoses help contractor to prevent damaging hoses

Help City Government to Serve Us Better

We need many city services to keep our community safe, functional and beautiful.  When you are worried about burglars, call police about suspicious persons and activities so they can come to take care things for us; when you see potholes in the street, call city so they can send service crews  timely to repair; when a neighbor does not take care their yard, and make the neighborhood look ugly, call the city to enforce city codes …

I enjoy our community park a lot, and early last year, I noticed the significant growth of invasive water grass in the pond of the park. I worried that the invasive grasses would destroy the ecosystem in the pond. I submitted a request to city park services for removal of the  invasive grasses. The city took action in a few weeks, as shown in the above photo, the grasses were withering due to chemical treatment, which might be harmful to water fowls. The invasive grass patch has minimized further since the photo time. I am pleased that the city helped me to keep our park beautiful.

Help others to help yourself !