Did you get the text?

Do you remember when texting was the epitome of casual, informal communication? No professional would be caught dead sending a text, of all things, to conduct business. Fast forward N number of years, and we now rely on text messages for a good chunk of business communication. Yeesh. How the times have changed, am I right?

So, let’s talk about one of the myriad reasons one may send a text as professional, business communication, then.

The contractors we have working in the public school system don't necessarily stay at the same school each week. If coverage is short at Location A relative to Location B, the district shuffles them around to ensure, well, to ensure the school stay a reasonable level of “short-staffed” without getting too extreme. Since my company is the employer of record, they execute this shuffle by notifying us of who they need to move and to where. We, in turn, notify the contractor(s) of the change in location and/or schedule as needed.

How do we do this? Texting.

Texting is a fast, efficient way of communication (I really don't need to spell that out for you), so we use it to send out weekly assignments to contractors whose school location will be changing the next week. Makes things a lot easier than calling through a hundred people, having them write it down with a pen and paper (because who has that just lying around anymore?).

Because we were not born yesterday, we double-check to ensure any contractor actually receives the texts from us as part of the employment onboarding. Some carriers, for whatever reason, block our texts, so we put notes in the files of contractors who do not get our texts as a safeguard against (hypothetically) our texting a contractor important business information and he/she not receiving it.

I’m sure you can see where this is leading, yes?

A contractor who had been doing the same job—receiving weekly assignment location/schedule updates for a month—called in asking where he was supposed to report.

I told him.

He asked what time he was supposed to report.

I told him.

He asked who he should ask for.

I told him.

He asked what the phone number was.

Fun as this game was, I was tired. I asked him if he got the text message we sent last week with all those details.

"Uh, well, I don't know."

I told him I'd resend the text with all the information he needed. Is there any more to say?

“I don’t know” if I got the text? C’mon, really? What is it? 2004? The last time I legitimately didn't know if I got a text or not was about the last time I forgot that I had a cell phone since it was such a new fangled device and forgot to click on that weird button that said I had a text message.