Jeffrey L. Seglin's Blog, page 20

Should I negatively review a typically reliable service company?

Should you post a negative rating for a service company you’ve received great work from for years?

That’s the question a reader we’re calling Amanda asked after her recent experience with a kitchen appliance repair service whose work has saved several of the aging appliances in her second-floor condo over the past several years. After an oven range began to act up about five years ago, Amanda began pricing what it would cost to replace the 20-something-year-old range with a newer model. After the sticker shock set in, she went onto Google and read the reviews of several local appliance repair companies before she settled on one whose reviews were numerous, stellar, and often from people living in her area.

“They came out, diagnosed the problem, and told me it would cost about $900 less for the parts and labor than it would have cost for a new range and any delivery charge,” wrote Amanda. The fix was made, the oven worked, and Amanda left a positive review on Google.

Whenever a friend was in need of a repair person, Amanda recommended the repair company. Her friends were equally pleased with the service and results.

Things changed right before Christmas after Amanda’s dishwasher began to leak and she had the repair service out to diagnose the issue.

“They found a piece had been corroded on the back of the dishwasher that needed to be replaced,” she wrote. The part was ordered and Amanda washed dishes in the sink for the couple of weeks it took for the part to come in and repair person to return to install it.

What Amanda didn’t know and only found out later was that the repair person who diagnosed the cause of the leak had disconnected the copper water line to the dishwasher when he moved the dishwasher out from under the counter so he could take a look. But rather than reconnect the water line, the repair person left it unconnected and small amounts of water left in the copper pipe slowly leaked into the back of her cabinets and began to drip through the corner of the ceiling right below her kitchen into the condo below her.

“At first we didn’t know what was causing the drip, but the guy who came to put the new part in figured it out,” wrote Amanda. There was no real damage to the condo below because the issue was caught in time. Amanda’s dishwasher works great now and she is relieved she didn’t have to spend the money on a new one, but she wonders whether she should post what happened in her review of the service.

No one is ever obligated to leave a review online for anything, so Amanda can rest easy not doing so. If she does post a review and she wants to be honest about the experience, the right thing is to include that detail about the drip.

But a better option might be to call the service repair company to tell the owner what happened. That might help ensure that the same mistake isn’t repeated by diagnosticians on future visits.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice , is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

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Can I write-off my donation without a receipt?

A reader we’re calling Agnetha was cleaning out her clothes closet over the holiday break. She assembled a pile of barely worn shoes that she decided she would donate to her local Goodwill store. After two days of sorting and compiling, Agnetha made the 16-minute drive to Goodwill to make the drop off.

Agnetha indicated in her email that she loves shoes, but she had come to terms that it was time to get the pairs she rarely wore onto the feet of someone who might make better and more frequent use of them. “I had about a dozen pair of shoes with me to donate all in great condition,” Agnetha wrote.

Typically, Agnetha indicated that she makes the drop-off to a large trailer-truck container in Goodwill’s parking lot. Generally, there is an attendant sitting at the open doors of the container to accept the donated items who can give Agnetha or others a receipt. But on this trip, while the container doors were open, there was no one in sight from whom to get a receipt.

“I don’t donate the items solely for the possibility of a tax write-off,” wrote Agnetha. “But if I can take the deduction, I’d like to.”

Agnetha is concerned, however, that she did not receive a receipt from Goodwill and wonders if it would be wrong to claim the charitable deduction anyway.

“Should I go back to Goodwill and get a receipt when someone is there?” asks Agnetha. “Or should I just write this off as a good deed and not bother with trying to claim the charitable deduction?” Agnetha made clear that she regularly will drop off bags of clothing to donation boxes along the highway and she rarely if ever tries to itemize those deductions on her taxes.

As I’ve written before, I am not a tax attorney intimately familiar with the nuances of what can or can’t be claimed as a charitable deduction. Nor am I familiar with Agnetha’s tax situation nor how she files her taxes each year.

But according to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service’s website, generally a receipt from a charity for goods donated is only needed if the donation is worth $250 or more. On its own website, Goodwill provides donors with guidelines on estimated donation values. For women’s shoes, it’s between $2 and $10. If Agnetha donated a dozen pair of shoes, the estimated value would fall between $24 and $120, well below that threshold. Agnetha would be wise to make a detailed record of what she donated, when she donated it, and the estimated value that she could keep in her own files if she decides to claim a charitable deduction.

If Agnetha would like to itemize her donations on a receipt from Goodwill for her records for piece of mind, those blank forms are available online for the donor to fill out. Or she can decide to simply donate the items without trying to take the deductions. The latter is a decision only she can make.

Again, I’m not a tax attorney so I am useless when it comes to helping Agnetha fill out her tax forms, but if she maintains detailed, honest records on her donations, that seems the right thing to do.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice , is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Looking back at another year of doing the right thing

A year ago, at the end of 2020, after looking at the analytics for the website where The Right Thing column gets posted after it has run in publications, it was clear that readers were drawn most to columns that touched on kindness, remembering those we’ve lost, and thankfulness.

Although many of us managed to return to school or work on-site during 2021, the year has proved just as unpredictable as its predecessor. Many people received vaccinations and booster shots. Trips to stores and restaurants seemed to increase. The new Spiderman movie killed it at the box office. But we also headed into a holiday season in late December when the Omicron variety of COVID began to spread rapidly. Travel warnings increased, availability of at-home COVID-testing kits became limited, and pandemic anxieties intensified.

Nevertheless, the column’s readers viewed the most were decidedly different. Although a few referred to us remaining in a pandemic, none were about the pandemic specifically. Instead, the five most-viewed columns in 2021 touched on job searches, neighbor relationships, and the importance of learning to listen to people without overreacting. In other words, although many of the columns I wrote during the past year covered pandemic-related questions and issues, readers seemed to return to an interest in those issues that attracted them in pre-pandemic times.

The fifth-most-viewed column, “Don’t rely on ‘fake it until you make it,’” ran in mid-August. It focused on a reader who was in the midst of a job search who seemed willing to take any job offered by embracing the idea of faking it until she knew how to do the work. I cautioned against faking or fabricating anything but instead looking for guidance and mentorship wherever possible.

The fourth-most-viewed column, “Two recycling stories and one good neighbor,” ran in late July and focused on one reader who was troubled that neighbors took advantage of his agreeing to let them use his recycling bin since theirs was full. It also featured another reader who offered to turn off neighbors’ irrigation system when they were away. Not every good deed goes well, but neighbors should learn to appreciate when the person next door does them a good turn.

My July 4 column, “Must we write every recommendation letter we are asked to write?” responded to the question in the title with a resounding “no.”

July 11′s “Objecting instead of invoking morality is the right thing to do” reminded readers that not everything we disagree with rises to the level of immoral. Sometimes, it’s good to remember, we just see things differently.

Finally, in the most-viewed column of the year, “Learning to ask the right questions is always the right thing,” I wrote in June of the importance of listening to people and asking them questions in a way that gets at what matters without sounding accusatory or judgmental. It was a lesson I had learned after serving as my wife’s in-house technology support when each of us was still working from home.

Thank you, as always, for continuing to email me your questions, stories, and reactions for The Right Thing column. May your year continue to be full of doing the right thing while surrounded by those in your life who choose to do the same.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice , is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Casting unsupported aspersions may shut down conversations

On December 20, actress and singer Bette Midler wrote a morning Twitter post castigating Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia for not supporting President Joe Biden’s proposed Build Back Better spending package. Rather than limit her focus on Manchin, Midler slammed the state of West Virginia by referring to it as: “Poor, illiterate and strung out.”

The negative response to Midler’s tweet was swift. Within 40 minutes, Midler had tweeted an apology “to the good people of WVA” for her outburst, attributing it to seeing red over Manchin’s lack of Democratic political support.

If Midler had taken a moment to dig, she would have found a report from Data for Progress, a progressive polling group, that found that a majority of West Virginians supported the Build Back Better plan.

No matter what caused her not to do so, Midler deserved to be publicly criticized for her Tweet attacking West Virginians with a broad, unfounded characterization. I have a fondness for West Virginia and West Virginians since one of the colleges I attended is there. A professional acquaintance once wondered why I publicly criticized her for her post on social media featuring negative stereotypes about West Virginia. I publicly criticized her for her post because baseless accusations are wrong and not only when they involve West Virginia.

When readers ask how to talk with those with whom they disagree, I don’t always have an answer that will yield success for them. But a cardinal rule in engaging with someone is to refrain from making broad, baseless accusations rather than sticking to what you know to be factual. A second rule is to decide whether you truly want to have a conversation with someone or whether your goal is to point out to them how very, very wrong they are about anything with which you don’t agree. If you can’t start by embracing these two rules of engagement before engaging, then my sense is that you really don’t want to engage.

If Midler had wanted to point out why she believed Sen. Manchin’s vote was wrong, she could have focused on that. If she wanted to engage West Virginians via social media to ask them whether their senator was truly serving their interests, she could have done that. But once she devolved into attacking the character of every person in West Virginia, she lost any ability to engage them in a discussion. Apologizing after a swift backlash to the “good people” might show remorse, but it does little to open an informed discussion.

The same goes for in-person discussions. Calling someone an idiot or immoral because he or she or they don’t agree with you shuts down the conversation and says more about the caller’s intolerance and dismissiveness than it does about whatever might be the desired focus of discussion.

Midler is hardly alone in such behavior. She just happens, with over 2 million Twitter followers as of this writing, to have a large platform that might have been used to greater effect had she refrained from baseless characterizations.

Perhaps, as we end another year, each of us should knock it off with the name calling and instead focus on our ability to argue strongly and factually for those things we support while listening openly to those who may disagree. From a distance, that seems the right thing to do.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice , is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Now and always is the time to help

Charitable giving in 2020 increased by 5.1% from 2019, according to Giving USA’s annual report on philanthropy. Individual and institutions gave a total $471.44 billion last year to charitable institutions. Giving USA doesn’t release its annual report about the previous year until spring, but some commentators on its website seem optimistic that giving in 2021 and 2022 will be similarly strong.

Perhaps not surprising, researchers such as Tim Sarrantonio of Neon One, a technology company that advises charitable organizations on raising funds, note that while there are opportunities to attract donors throughout the year, December remains a big month for donations flowing in. And even though Giving Tuesday falls during the first week of December, “the final days of December tend to attract the largest flow of gifts no matter what.”

Here we are at the end of December. If you have the urge to give or help before the month is up, there are plenty of opportunities.

Some readers already have local, national, or international charities to which they contribute. Shortly after the tornadoes devastated parts of Kentucky, organizations like CARE (https://my.care.org) and Feeding America (http://feedingamericaky.org) put out the call for cash donations that would help get food to those affected.

For those of you trying to sort out how much of you cash donation actually goes to the cause rather than running the charity, Charity Navigator (www.charitynavigator.org) remains a valuable source of information. Another organization, Give Well (www.givewell.org) goes a bit further and tries to measure how well specific charities succeed at their missions and provides a list of top giving opportunities on its website. It also has developed its Maximum Impact Fund where rather than choose a recipient, you designate how much you want to give and Give Well donates the funds where they determine they can do the most and then reports back to donors on where their money was donated.

Cash contributions are not the only way of giving to others in need. The American Red Cross (www.redcrossblood.org) indicates on its website that its blood supply is dangerously low. For those who are able to donate blood, the website makes it simple to find local blood drives by typing in your ZIP code. And for those who donate blood between December 17 and Jan. 2, the American Red Cross is even offering donors a long-sleeve T-shirt while supplies last.

There are also ways to donate time or expertise to local organizations in person or to those more far afield remotely. If you want to do some good for those who might be in need, there are plenty of opportunities and there is still time to do so before the year comes to a close. If you know of a particular good organization or effort to help others, tell your friends who might be in search of some as well.

But if you really want to make a difference, the right thing is not to wait until the end of the year, but instead spread out all the acts of kindness over the course of year. The need for help from others doesn’t appear only during specific holidays or seasons.

Thank you for whatever you are able to do. May your holidays and coming year be full of patience and kindness.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice , is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Small acts of kindness when no one is looking abound

A few weeks ago, I asked readers to tell me the small or not so small things they have done for others or others have done for them when no one is looking over the past year-and-a-half of coexisting with a pandemic. Many responded.

M.A., a reader from Santa Rosa, California, wrote that she has tried to do “the right thing” almost every day of her adult life, except for the time she stole a roll of Scotch tape from the office where she worked. She still feels badly about that episode but, now in her 80s, writes that she continues to act as “rightly” as she is able and that doing so “feels good.”

Another reader posted on Twitter that he picked up garbage pails for his elderly neighbors after a bad windstorm on trash pickup day.

K.C. from Hilo, Hawaii, writes that she does “the right thing without anyone looking almost daily.” When she sees trash on the ground, she picks it up to dispose of it, even if she has to temporarily put it in her car on the way to disposal. K.C. regularly picks up items from the grocery store floor when she sees them to return them to their correct place on the shelves.

A small neighborhood shopping center frequented by J.V. of Petaluma, California, recently had cars broken into. Broken glass was scattered in two of the parking spots. J.V. was concerned that because the glass was starting to spread, “tires would be compromised,” so he asked a coffee shop barista about it and was told the landlord had known about the broken glass for two days and had yet to take care of getting it cleaned up. J.V. went home, grabbed a broom, dustpan, and gloves and returned to the parking lot. “In 10 minutes, I restored three parking spots that cars had been avoiding.” Clearly a small thing, J.V. writes, but the right thing to do.

J.W. is in a memoir-writing class that meets every eight weeks via Zoom. When a classmate told the instructor that she couldn’t afford to continue the class, the teacher told her that there was a fund available to help students “supplement the payment” if they needed assistance. No one but her teacher knows J.W. is the source of the funds. “It gives me great pleasure to see this classmate every week … and note how her writing has evolved.” She’s looking forward to meeting the classmate in person someday.

“Just before Covid raised its ugly head,” writes L.H., her husband became ill with congestive heart failure. While his heart has recovered, his kidneys were affected in the process and he now has to receive dialysis three times a week. Besides being her husband’s primary caregiver, she has tenants to whom she rents property. “My tenants have really stepped up during this crisis,” she writes. They make sure any and all repairs are taken care of. “They are the nicest people in the world. I love them.”

These and other stories reassure me that there are plenty of examples of people doing the right thing even when no one is looking. “If everyone did small things every day what a great place the world would be,” writes K.C. from Hilo, Hawaii. I agree.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice , is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Learning to listen as vigorously as we speak

In 1990, an attorney named Mike Godwin came up with a premise that the longer Internet discussion threads progressed it was inevitable that someone would make a comparison to Hitler or Nazis. The premise became what is now referred to as Godwin’s Law. Some online forums went further than Godwin himself did and established the rule that whenever Hitler or Nazis were invoked in a discussion the discussion was over and who did the invoking officially was deemed the loser. But Godwin has since made clear that he believed that comparing someone to Hitler shouldn’t automatically end a discussion as long as the person making the comparison showed some knowledge of history and was thoughtful.

I bring up Godwin’s Law now since we seem immersed in a moment when many online or in-person discussions lead to an invocation of the former or current or 44td or 43nd president of the United States not as it relates to a particular policy issue but more as a way of shutting down the possibility of any reasonable discussion. The name is hurled more as a pronouncement than that the person it’s being hurled at is irrational, unreasonable, or untethered. The results make it near impossible to have a reasonable discussion on everything from healthcare and taxes to education and poverty, as well as most things in between including which professional athletes are acceptable to root for.

When we can’t talk about pressing social issues with those who have differing views, the likelihood that we can address these pressing social issues becomes diminished. If invoking a politician’s name as an epithet shuts down the conversation, it’s reasonable to argue that perhaps it’s time for each of us to focus more on the issues about which we are passionate.

My best friend and I met in the fifth grade. We were each the best man at the other’s wedding. We live on opposite coasts but we still talk every week. Politically, we are about as far apart from one another on issues as you could imagine. Yet we still talk about social issues, politics, and policy. So far, in more than 50 years of friendship neither of us has judged the other to be evil or corrupt or an idiot because we think differently from one another. We just disagree strongly about some stuff and we each do what we can to support the issues we care about. Each of us might hope that some day we might be able to convince one another to come around to thinking differently on some things, but we don’t invoke past politicians’ names as a bludgeon to shut talk down.

It seems important to call for more focus in the way we talk to one another, even or most especially with those with whom we disagrees. Focus on the issues, not the person. Focus on the desired outcomes, not the political affiliations. Focus on being as informed as we can become on an issue rather than mouth off something we read posted on a social media site by someone we have never heard of and for which we have no context or support.

With so much noise coming from all directions, the right thing seems to be to become as informed as possible and to learn to listen as vigorously as we speak.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice , is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Tell me your stories of doing right when no one was looking

 I’ve often quoted psychiatrist and author Robert Coles who wrote in his book “The Call of Stories: Teaching and Moral Imagination” (Houghton Mifflin, 1990) that character “is how you behave when no one is looking.” As we reach the end of another particularly challenging year, I’m curious how you’ve behaved on occasions when no one is looking.

Since at least March 2020, many of us have wrestled in one way or another with the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve been sequestered at home. We’ve been careful in the way we shop or socialize with others outside of our home. Parents of young and school-age children have worked to find a way to keep their kids safe and educated while balancing their own work lives thrown off kilter. We’ve been tested, received vaccinations and now boosters, and some of us have made our way back to work while adjusting to a new reality of wearing masks and continuing to be cautious.

And all the while we’ve continued to be faced with ethical challenges. Some are big, but most are the small day-to-day variety that call on us to be honest or kind when no one is watching. Those small day-to-day actions partly define our character. They may not involve saving a life or single-handedly ending hunger in our community, but they define us nonetheless, even when it feels like it’s no big deal.

I was reminded of this last weekend when I engaged in the first of the big leaf rake-ups for the season. The woman I’d eat bees for and I spent about seven hours over two days bagging up leaves and bringing them to our town’s public composting site. It takes a few trips to get all the leaves loaded on the back of an old pickup truck to the site. On one of the trips, I noticed that instead of the 16 bags of leaves I can carry on each trip, I was one bag short. On the way home, I noticed a bag of leaves on the side of the road. There was no easy pull over so I continued driving home.

It would not be truthful for me to tell you that the thought didn’t cross my mind to just leave the bag there. There was after all no way to trace it back to me unless someone had seen it fall off the truck.

That thought passed and I left an empty spot for the bag for the return trip to the composting site, put my hazard lights on as I pulled as far off to the side of the road as possible, and heaved the escaped bag into its spot on the back of the truck.

A small thing, but one less bit of trash for the town employees to clean up and less risk that the bag might blow into traffic and cause a motorist some woe. It was clearly a small thing, but it was the right thing to do.

Now, tell me the small or not so small things you’ve done or others have done for you when no one was looking over the past year-and-a-half or so. Tell me who and where you are and send your stories to me at jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. If it’s OK with you, I may share some of your stories in the weeks ahead.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice , is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Should you ask to borrow a photo posted by someone else?

You’ve found a perfect photo. You just love the photo. You want to keep the photo forever. But the photo does not belong to you.

Is it OK to copy and paste a photo from someone else’s social media site — a photo that someone else indicates he, she, or they took — without seeking permission from the original poster of the photo? That’s the question a reader we’re calling Annie asked me recently indicating that she really wants to download some photos from social media posts made by friends and family and has done so in the past. Each time, however, Annie writes that she feels a bit of guilt or remorse that she has done something wrong because she has never sought permission to download the photo.

On most social media sites you can limit the people who are able to view your posts, so such photo pilferage is at least kept among a close few, or a close several hundred depending on how many “friends” you have on your account. But near as I can tell there’s no feature that automatically sends a message to a social media account holder asking them if it’s OK to download whatever someone wants to download. Perhaps that’s a feature social media companies should consider.

But without such a feature, friends and followers are left to their own consciences when deciding when and what to borrow from someone else’s post and when, if ever, to ask permission.

I am not a copyright lawyer and I admit right off that I have not read the entirety of every user agreement for every social media site in the land. But regardless of law or fine print, it strikes me that any original photo or item being posted by someone has been created by them and they should have some say over what gets borrowed by whom. Of course, that doesn’t happen which is how memes and posts sometimes go viral and the originator gets lost to Internet history.

We’re not talking about random and willy-nilly reposting of items from unknown origins. We’re talking about taking something from a friend for your own pleasure or use without seeking that friend’s permission. Such borrowing without alerting the originator doesn’t strike me as how friends or anyone should treat one another.

Granted, when someone makes their posts public to the world (well, the Internet world), they should know there’s a good chance others might abscond with their creations. Even if it’s not for nefarious use, putting something out there is bound to find it grabbed by others for their own personal use.

The right thing, however, is to ask when you want to download someone else’s photo for whatever reason you want it. Yes, it will take longer to send the request and wait for a response. And it would take the poster extra time to read and respond to your request. But it’s the kind of behavior that should be expected of friends and family when they want to borrow something. Besides, if the item Annie wants to copy is that good, aren’t good things worth the wait?

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice , is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Should you tell someone if something negative is written about them?

What should you do when you read something that might negatively affect someone you know but you don’t relish being the bearer of bad news?

I follow many people and institutions on Twitter. Some share views with which I generally agree. Others don’t. I also have alerts set up on my search engine so I am notified when news stories appear about people, institutions, or things in which I am interested. These alerts are set to get combined in one email I receive once a day if there is anything that matches the alert criteria.

A few days ago an alert arrived with a link to an article about a former colleague I’m calling Art that questioned the colleague’s appropriateness for a new position. I was pretty sure that someone else might have seen the article and told Art about it, but I wasn’t positive given that the article was in a publication that wasn’t particularly well known.

My colleague is accomplished, has a fairly high profile, and has been consistent in various things he’s written or spoken about over the years. His Internet footprint is not insignificant. It’s quite likely that other negative pieces had appeared about him over the years, but I had not seen any.

I had no idea how my colleague would react to first learning about this most recent missive about him. We had a good relationship when we worked together and have maintained it over the many years that have passed since then. Did I really want to deal with being the one to deliver the news? He would be none the wiser if I said nothing and left him to discover the article in some other way, if at all. Life is full. Life during the pandemic is even more full. Do I really need to add another unwelcome task to my life? After all, it’s not my job to ensure that my former colleagues’ flanks are covered.

Even though I know I have appreciated it over the years when a friend, colleague, or relative has alerted me to not-so-kind barbs tossed my way online, it still would have been simpler not to let Art know what I had discovered.

Ultimately, any hesitation I had about emailing Art about the article was only to figure out how to word my message as kindly and reassuringly as possible. The right thing was to let him know because his life might be made a tad easier if he didn’t find himself blindsided by receiving the information in some other way. Angry reader emails. Other reporters showing up in the inbox or, worse, at the door.

Those who argue that no good often comes from delivering bad news so it’s best to keep your head down and nose out of other’s business are missing an important point. If we ignore our responsibility to be decent human beings who try to ease someone else’s potential discomfort when we can, we risk becoming immune to the incivilities and disrespect that gets tossed around too easily. We risk becoming the person we swore we never wanted to become.

I emailed Art. He’d already knew about the piece. We had a nice exchange. He knows I am here if he needs to chat and I am confident he would do the same for me were the roles reversed.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice , is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.