Power of "Asking"

Let me tell a story

I recently went to India on a vacation and didn't realize that my Data was left ON by mistake while my SIM was on International Roaming. I turned if off immediately when I found out my blunder but only after couple of days. When i came back to Singapore, I was anticipating the horror when my Phone bill is generated.  Sure enough, S$ 453 of data usage bill was staring at me.  I cursed myself one more time for being how silly i was and promised myself never to repeat this by disabling the international roaming altogether. That's a good preventive measure for future but what about the damage now? I convinced myself that i will write this off as a one-time expense and learn from it.

Then I thought, am i first one to do this blunder ? Probably, not. Then why don't I call SingTel and tell them my sad story. I did just that. I called them and told them how stupid I was and described the accident.

Then i ASKED, "Can you do something about it? and added please !! "

I expected them to be business like and tell me that it is what it is and they did what was part of my terms and conditions.

But guess what, the girl on the other side of the line wasn't a surprised a bit (and had probably heard this many times before) and she heard me patiently and told me that she can put me on a 1 day roaming plan which was something like S$ 30 / day and reverse this amount.

Wow !! I wasn't expecting anything but here i reduced 90 % of my damage by just "ASKING"

The morale of the story for myself was that so many times in life we let go of opportunities because we just "ASSUME" that things won't change instead of "ASKING" even once. Some of the times we don't do this because we are afraid of REJECTION of being told NO and our ego is too big to handle that. I have learnt that there is nothing wrong in asking for help. There is nothing to lose by asking something and sometimes getting rejected. The benefits of asking far our-weigh the risk of not asking and missing important opportunities.