When Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, addressed the iPhone 4’s antenna problems last Friday, problems causing many owners to experience dropped calls, he offered them and prospective consumers three choices. Those who haven’t yet bought the phone can get free bumpers, cases which Apple says help reduce the problem of dropped calls, when they purchase it.  Those who have already bought the phone can be reimbursed for the amount of the cases. And anyone displeased with either idea can return the phone for total reimbursement. Â
 Some say this swift marketing solution tamped down the furor surrounding Apple when the IPhone 4 didn’t satisfy customers. I think they’re right. Unlike an apology, fervent though it might be, what we really hope for when something goes wrong is that the person taking responsibility for it DOES something about it.
 The anxiety that follows being wronged is compounded when the wrongdoer does nothing but maybe say he feels a little bad about it. An apology is important, but we hapless consumers are by now used to the late, hesitant, forced, nonapology offered only when the perpetrator needs to save his own neck. Even a heartfelt  apology does little else than relieve us of the burden of carrying around the perpetrator’s lack of remorse. Better at taking away the anxiety and misery that lingers after a hurtful act is a remedy; a solution not for their guilt but for the wound they inflicted. “I was wrong, and I want to fix it. Would this help? If not, would this? YOU decide. I’ll take full responsibility.”
 I have an idea. What if, when someone you love hurts you, instead of saying, “Hey, wow, if you think I hurt you, I’m sorry,” he said, “I’ve thought about this and I want to make you feel better. I’ll try a and b to relieve your pain, or c and d; in fact, you tell me what I can do to make it up to you, and whatever it is, I’ll do it. Because this was my fault, not yours.”  Â
Wouldn’t you feel slightly better about him? Just for devoting the time to redress  his “crime”?  If more people understood that hurtful actions require undoing, not dodging, ignoring, covering up or defending, there would be a lot less anxiety hovering like a shadowy cloud over so many relationships. Â
 
Amen!
How true. I’ve been told over and over again by wife that “actions” speak louder than “words.” And, on a side note… “Apple, you ROCK!”
Right you are! And to add to your thought that “it might take some time and undoing to make [things] right again”: Some people I know have told me that when they witnessed how hard their partners tried to make things right again, they saw their parrtners in a new way. “He was once again the man who courted me,” one young woman told me, when her lover worked hard to attone for a potentially deal-breaking mistake. “I remembered how kind he really is; how much he cares about us….”
As James Taylor put it in one of his best songs, “Shower the people you love with love/Show them the way you feel/things are going to work out better/If you only will…..”
Thanks!