|
Andrew Lindemann Malone's Internet Playpen |
|
A Little Less Conversation: Carefully Tending Your IgnoranceFor most of the first two years of my career in government, I was not given anything particularly urgent to do. Since then, I have begun receiving urgent work; simultaneously, I was introduced to various methods of soliciting input that allow the solicitor to ignore that input as much as possible. The key to explaining this seeming paradox is to distinguish importance from urgency, and further, to realize that most people don’t particularly like to work on a problem until it becomes urgent. Much of my work during my first couple years was important, but like vintners getting the best possible flavor from this year’s poor crop of grapes, the parties ultimately responsible for ensuring that the work was properly done allowed it to sit, so that the robust but ultimately dull flavor of importance could acquire the bracing tang of urgency as well. It was commonly understood that everyone was free to ignore the work until it became drinkable, so to speak. Then the responsible parties imbibed the work deeply at one sitting and, often enough, make decisions that were about as good as the decisions you make when you’ve drunk an entire bottle of wine. I wish this metaphor was more fanciful. If everything you’re working on is urgent, however, that’s a lot of wine to drink. You don’t want to further complicate matters by allowing other people to give their input on matters that already appear to be clear to you (or that, after a few glasses, somehow still appear to be non-opaque to you). But in this mamby-pamby let’s-all-sit-around-the-campfire-and-hold-hands society we live in, higher-ups often require lower-down managers to solicit other people's input and, worse, actually consider it. The ideal communication scheme in such a situation would allow the responsible parties to:
Herewith, a rundown of the communications tools every government manager who works on urgent projects should master. I’m sure much of this discussion applies to private-sector toiling as well, but hey, I’m not obligated to ask. Most of these tools have productive uses in addition to the ones I am citing, but those aren’t going to help when you’re plastered on urgency and have to deliver something two minutes from now WHERE’S THAT DAMN REPORT??!?! And why is Andrew calling?
These devices typically allow you to read Microsoft Office files attached to e-mails but do not do so particularly reliably, introducing a delighful element of chance that further thickens the fog. The fact that the Blackberry device specifically seems to secrete some sort of neurotoxin that convinces its users that its use during meetings is unobtrusive, when in fact it is one of the more visibly and blatantly disrespectful activities available to you during a meeting, is just a delighful bonus.
To take calls from more salaried folk, you should have your ringer set on the “stun” volume, one which ideally sets treesful of birds to screeching every time it goes off within fifty miles of a forest. When your phone rings, thus drawing everyone's exasperated attention, you should theatrically check the caller ID display, then stride out of the room as purposefully as possible to take the call. If you can look up while striding, it will both allow you to avoid the annoyed glares of other meeting attendees and give those attendees the impression that you equate the phone call you are taking with God speaking through a burning bush. (You can also simply take the call during the meeting, but no one who is in the meeting with you will retain even one single solitary shard of respect for you. The idea is to ignore people in a socially acceptable manner, not to simply go around starting beef with your co-workers. Sadly, all the means of ignoring people that I am citing in this essay are now socially accepted.) Making it impossible for people to complete their thoughts is normally accomplished by leaving your cell phone on during a meeting and allowing the ring to pierce everyone’s skull as the call is rolled over to voice mail (assuming the caller is unimportant enough that you will remain in the meeting). However, a delightful variation is to put your cell phone on vibrate but leave it on the table, resulting in a noise like a Fisher-Price chainsaw attacking a particleboard tree. I personally had the following conversation during a meeting:
On a phone conference, it is impossible to know when to speak, because you cannot take any cues from your fellow conferees or from anyone who may be physically present in the room from which the conference is being run. If the people who are physically present and running the conference are devious or oblivious enough, they will frequently rise from the table and pace around while making their points, which makes it impossible for those on the phone to hear what the hell the people in the room are saying. Same goes for crosstalk, and it is especially charming when people have side conversations close to the phone such that you cannot hear whatever information the people holding the meeting are half-heartedly trying to impart. The phone conferees typically don't do each other any favors, either. Some people put the conference on speaker and then do not mute their lines, causing the whole conference to take on a submarine echo. Often, people using the speaker forget they are on conference and have unrelated conversations with people who enter their offices. Cube dwellers get to choose between using speaker and annoying their neigbors or using the earpiece and making their ears sore as hell, depending on how long the phone call is. (My record is three hours and thirty minutes. I did not like life that day.) It takes an act of will to persevere through all these distracions and barriers and make your opinions known. Most people won't bother. If anyone realizes that something's up after the phone conference is over and reflective thought can once again take place, poof! the idea's already been implemented.
The whole process makes people think they are much stupider than they are - just the sort of credulity you need to foist a piece of dubious software onto them! Even if you could think of useful feedback during a Web conference, it would once again take an act of will to express it, since you still have to express it through the phone-conference medium.
The typical method is saying, "Sorry, I didn't see it. I'm swamped." Note the word "swamped," which is used at least 90 percent of the time in these situations. The implication is that your e-mail is a stagnant morass in which you are trapped and struggling for life. If you attempt to point out to the person in question that he or she specifically requested your feedback and thus should have been looking for it amid the spam, you may say "I get [insert large number] of e-mails a day," implying that you have been rendered senseless by the electronic onslaught and thus unable to look for specific names in the From: line. Of course, you can probably choose from among the hundreds of options offered by their cable system with no problem, so the argument that excessive stimuli make you a blithering idiot may not sustain you for long. A much better way to ignore e-mail feedback is to specify that it should be sent in an attachment (like comments inserted into a premade table) and then only attempt to read the attachment using your Blackberry portable e-mail reading device, which as noted above can actually display attached documents only sporadically. This makes it sound like you are attempting to work but have been defeated by the same technology that you successfully used to ignore the initial feedback that was given to you during a meeting. It is best to get off the phone right after you say this, or, if you are being confronted in person, dive under your desk. E-mail can also be used to solicit opinions in such a way that you will never receive feedback. Just wait until the prospective feedback-givers are working on something that is really really urgent and important, and then send out your 120-page document. They may be operatic in their disdain for your feedback-soliciting practices (as I was when this happened to me), but they'll miss whatever arbitrary deadline you impose for feedback submission. • Man, that's depressing for something that was supposed to be a humor piece. Anyway, if you have any additional insights on this kind of communications jujitsu, please send them along by 11:25 pm on June 30, 2006. I will only accept feedback submitted in Microsoft Word files, 12-point Times New Roman text, with no macros or clip art. I'll read it in my imaginary Blackberry and get back to you.
|
|||||||||||
 |
|
|
All this tasty writing ©2002-8 by Andrew Lindemann Malone. All rights reserved. |
The Blackberry (and other pocket-size wireless e-mail reading devices). The Blackberry is the single greatest ignoring device ever invented. Have you been forced by custom or supervisor to call a meeting to solicit feedback on whatever it is you are working on? If that meeting drags for even fifteen seconds, the Blackberry allows you to mentally exit by ducking your head and checking your e-mail, ensuring that any useful products or important questions generated by the meeting will zoom by you whilst you delete building-wide spam about the latest special-emphasis program event. Later, when decisions made in these meetings come back to bite you in the behind, you can use your Blackberry to respond anrgily to the decisons made regarding these now hyper-urgent matters while sitting in another meeting that has begun dragging. Thus a permanent fog of distraction surrounds you, through which no useful information enters and from which no timely input emerges. 
Cellular phones. Cell phones are used to ignore people during meetings either by allowing you to take calls from people more important (read: earning a higher salary) than any of the people you are meeting with or to simply make it impossible for other meeting attendees to complete their thoughts. 
Phone conferences. Phone conferences are most useful when you have a somewhat dubious idea that you have to implement immediately. The reason for this is that no one on a phone conference really wants to speak up and register any objections, because that would lengthen the phone conference, and being on a phone conference is one of the most miserable states of existence yet devised by modern technology. 
Web conferences. If you have dubious software to demonstrate, you want to take it to a Web conference, which takes all the disadvantages of phone conferences and adds several more:
E-mail. What could be clearer than an e-mail? It's just text, sometimes with a file attached. And that's just the problem: Whoever sent feedback expressed it as unambiguously as possible, and furthermore has a record of having sent it. Also, the sender's name shows up in your inbox, typically along with a subject line indicating that the e-mail addresses the topic on which you requested feedback. You need to be able to ignore that.