"Laure, who had heard the details before, had spent the time admiring her and weighing his reply." (p. 741)
If someone speaks at length, then their auditor has more time to consider a response. Verbal communication can be anything but straightforward.
A woman asked me a question and continued to speak. I waited for her to finish speaking before I replied. She looked puzzled because I was not replying. I realized that she expected us to speak simultaneously!
A colleague asked me half a dozen questions without pausing for breath. Remembering the order of the questions, I replied, "Yes, yes, no, maybe, don't know, yes." She asked, "What does that mean?" She had forgotten the order and possibly also the content of the questions.
Someone rang my work to complain about a colleague. She stated her complaint, then, not knowing what to say next, repeated the complaint, then, again not knowing what to say next, said, "That's my complaint," and hung up, having given me no time to respond.
At a conference, I was in a sub-group that gave me the job of preparing a summary of our discussion to report back to the plenary. While I was writing, a colleague said, "All you need to say, Paul, is..." Then a woman in the group, thinking of something that amused her, addressed the group, interrupting my colleague who stopped speaking because she had started. When she had finished, I asked him what I should say. He regarded me with complete incomprehension. He had forgotten not only what he was going to say but that he had been saying anything.
A teacher I trained with would speak at length, then say, "Having said that...," then speak at further length, then look to his auditor for a response. All that you had to do was to begin to quote one of the things that he had said either before or after the "Having said that..." He would then take this as his cue to interrupt you and expound further on that single point.
A colleague always asked, "What's this, Paul?" or "Are you going to this thing, Paul?" I always had to ask a question before I could answer a question.
A Polish friend mischievously told two fellow Poles, "Of course, Paul's a Communist." I was immediately, aggressively asked whether I had read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. I tried to reply, "No, but I have read Trotsky's Revolution Betrayed and Cliff's State Capitalism In Russia." I was interrupted after the "No..." and berated on the assumption that I supported the then Soviet Union. I should have said, "Yes," which at that time was untrue but was all that mattered. (This couple also "knew" that all black people were bad and were so convinced of this that they would not discuss the matter.)
Interrupting a school lesson to call one pupil out for a careers interview, I was immediately bombarded with questions like "What are they?" "When's mine?" "Can I have one?" "Why haven't I had one yet?" "What are they?" Of course, I did not answer any of this and felt bad about causing such an interruption to the lesson although really I was hardly responsible.
Blog readers might gather that I can be frustrated by verbal communication and sometimes prefer to write.
In The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressel presents an authentic description of the confused nature of lunch time conversation among a group of building workers.
2 comments:
A single sentence in a work of fiction can reflect aspects of readers' lives.
Three more examples:
A woman told me that her son now lived in Flat (i.e., Apartment) no. 5 at the end of the street. Since there were three blocks of flats there, I asked her to tell me not only his flat number but also his street number. She genuinely did not understand my question. She could only keep repeating, "They've got THEIR OWN numbers!" I realized that I would have to find out for myself. Sure enough, the street number did not matter. One block was Flats 1-5, the next was Flats 6-10, the remaining Block was Flats 11-15. They had THEIR OWN numbers. But why was she not able to understand my question and explain her answer?
Approaching a house, I heard a neighbour shouting from an upper window, "She's not in! SHE'S NOT IN!" This was irrelevant. I would in any case confirm for myself that there was no answer to the door and then put a message through the letter box. I was not going to just turn around and walk away.
Getting contact details from a client, I was given only a mobile telephone number. When asked whether there was also a landline number, she could only repeat, "It's MY house!" Eventually I understood that she meant that, because she was the only person living in the house, she did not need a landline as well as her mobile.
Kaor, Paul!
Verbal, in person "communication" can be very frustrating!
Ad astra! Sean
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