Some people say that I am really good with children. I don’t know if it is that or I am just bad with adults and understand children better. Adult interaction is just so complicated.
This week at work, the front secretary of our office came and told me that my appointment had arrived. She was not in a good mood. Apparently he had done something huffy with the door and his bag and had really upset her. I had never met this professor, so I wondered what I was in for. But the secretary seem really ticked at him.
The professor came down to my office, and proceeded to wonder what he had done to make the secretary so upset. He was saying that she was acting hostile towards her and he didn’t know what he did to upset her.
All of this is just way too complex for me. I thought the professor was a pretty nice man myself. So who knows where the conflict started. With children, it a lot easier. All three of my readers know that I used to teach at an inner city junior high. With junior high students, 80% of the time there is a clear antagonist. Sure, you try to teach them to turn the other cheek and not respond in the same spirit and all, but the truth is – one of the two is usually always trying to push the other’s buttons.
I broke up a few fights in my days in the trenches. Thankfully, all but one of those break-ups were pre-emptive… i.e. before fists flew. The one where the fists were already flying was quite the adventure. And pretty funny, actually. But then again, all three of my readers have heard that story a million times.
Adults are much easier to upset and much harder to figure out than junior high kids. There is one group blog that I like to read… but now I try to avoid commenting on it. One of the bloggers just seems antagonistic towards me. Every comment I leave, even if it is not on one of his postings, seems to get a smart-alecky reply from him. Or even worse, he takes my comments in the most negative light and sets out to rebuke me. I know that sometimes I can be cryptic in my comments, so I try to give him the benefit of the doubt. The sad thing is, if I respond to him the way he responds to me, I get a huge tantrum response. I don’t know what I did to upset him, but I even tried to apologize once and he said “I’m not buying it.” Oh, well. What can you do? I just lay low on that blog now.
The Internet is the crappiest thing for real communication.
I suspect if you sat down face-to-face with the guy in question, you all would probably get along famously.
Well, Bird, the weird thing is that I work in online education. We read studies all the time about how the Internet can increase real communication. I see it happening everywhere I look… except in the blogosphere. In fact, I would go further to say that the only place I really have a problem is in the Christian blogosphere. There is like a whole different set of rules there that I guess I just don’t get. To me, it seems like I can find more Biblical discussions outside of the Christian blogosphere than I can inside. There are many exceptions, of course. Like yo, of course, and many of your co-bloggers. “Bill” (if that is his real name), for example, like you, is always extremely humble and receptive to disagreement. Well, I rarely disagree with him. But when I have seen others, I have seen him respond in humility and openness. When someone is being arrogant or know-it-all-ish, you just can’t hide that. Or, for that matter, convince me that I a person that acts that way on a blog is different in real life. Creecy said it best once: “wow – that dude has got to chill out. That response was just too hostile.”
Of course, I also have to point out that one of the group blogs I read is on a non-Christian site, and one of the people on there that constantly gives me a hard time just hates my guts because I told him you can’t compare gay rights to the race rights. That is a whole other long story….
The problem, I think, with the Internet is you can’t portray non-verbal communication like voice inflection, etc.
You’re right about Bill, by the way, and that is his real name. I’m the only one over there who hides behind a moniker. 🙂
Okay – not sure what I am doing wrong, but I am supposed to get an email when there is a new comment. In theory. So anyway…
I think that there are plenty of examples out there of how non-verbal communication is messed up in face-to-face communication also. For example, some people are just weird and have their voice inflection all wrong, or are just stiff and have none what-so-ever. There are many times when non-verbal communication has helped a conversation, but I can also think of times when crossed signals and mis-read inflection have ruined it also. I think it just comes down to humans messing up communication period – the medium doesn’t really matter.