I was sound asleep over the festive period when a customer I knew to maybe say hello to felt it was acceptable to message me at 4am ranting about a late taxi.
My warped sense of what was normal meant I replied, then rang the office to sort it.
The following morning my wife asked who had been messaging me at that hour. I explained. She looked at me and said: "How can anyone possibly think that's acceptable? What if I contacted the CEO of Marks and Spencer with a complaint?"
My wife has an art of hyperbolising the extent of a breach of boundaries. She was also completely right.
At the time we were handling around 10,000 customers a week and I had spent years making the business genuinely responsive, but somewhere along the way I had confused caring about customers with being personally available to them at any hour.
Over twenty years the defining change was communication technology. The landline only ever got used for a genuine someone is on fire emergency. The mobile made contact feel somehow less intrusive to the person sending it, even when it wasn't.
Once people know they can reach you directly, it is very difficult to walk that back. The same applied to staff. Genuine emergencies, yes. A gripe that could wait until Monday morning belonged in the right place at the right time, not landing on me whenever somebody felt like having it.
It took a 4am message over Christmas and my wife's reaction the next morning to make me draw the line properly. We still smile about the Marks and Spencer line.
She was right. I should have done it sooner.