Today’s guest blog is by Beth-Ann.
I pride myself in my ability to explain things both complex and simple. After all I have successfully explained alpha thalassemia major in Hmong and can go on (and on) about the likely association of immunoreactive trypsinogen to spontaneous intestinal perforation in extremely premature infants.
Why then does my family not always understand what I say?
After college graduation my parents left me in charge of the younger kids when they went abroad. They also left my college-age sister as an assistant since I was working full-time. One night I explained that the following night’s dinner would be a family favorite-chicken pot pie. I prepared all the constituents as my mother always did. I reviewed the assembly with my sister. “Just put the chicken, the sauce, and the vegetables in this pan, and cover it with the crust,” I said with great patience to my sister who wasn’t exactly a domestic goddess. When I asked if she had any questions, her response left me speechless. With all sincerity she said, “Can I leave the vegetables in the can or do I have to take them out?”……I picked up dinner at McDonald’s rather than risk eating her preparation.
Fast forward many years to when my son was in first grade. Because of his bone disease and frequent fractures he didn’t often dress himself. There were, however several days when I had the flu and a high fever and since he could walk I would send him to his room with instructions to put on clean underwear and the pants and shirt I had put out for him.
On the 3rd day I looked up from my delirium and noticed that his leg looked much more crooked than I had remembered it. I had hope that the giant bend in his femur was just a fever-induced illusion. I arranged to meet his physical therapist when she came to school that day to see Scott. The three of us went to the bathroom to slip off the sweatpants and look at his leg. I was surprised to see that my son was wearing 3 pairs of underpants. His response has become a family classic for failure to follow directions-“You didn’t say to take them off before I put on the clean ones.”
When did the message not get through?
Trail Baboon 
too funny beth ann, the english language is a very precise tool and must be used accordingly eh? you should have let your sister do the pot pie with the can. that would have been memorable. i used to listen to a motovational speaker on tape named charles tremendous jones. he had a talk where he would talk about how he learned lessons from his children that you can actually have someone sitting across the table form you , looking you right in the eye, nodding at the appropriate times and not hearing a single word that you are saying. in my house i am that person. i am afraid i have a wandering brain and if the presented topic is presented in a meandering or less than slam bam to the point fashion i have the ability to enter the twighlight zone for extended periods of time.
should make for a fun responxe day.
send warm thoughts to clyde and sandy in box and furnature mode in this less than ideal moving day
LikeLike
Love the guy’s name. tim, you could just go by t. jones and when people ask, say the t. is for tremendous.
LikeLike
I’m not sure I can limit the number to anything that isn’t mind-numbing! I’ve always thought that children were born lawyers. One day, when the child was about four, I picked up the phone in my studio and heard no dial tone. Tried again and when I went to check if the cord was still plugged in, I noticed a nice, neat sever in the cord about 12″ from the handset. And then I noticed the pair of green plastic kiddy scissors sitting next to the phone. When I asked her about it, the child said “You said that I wasn’t supposed to use your big scissors.”
LikeLike
ha! a literal mind is a wonderful thing.
LikeLike
Today is not a moving day, but rather unloading and moving boxes so the furniture can come in tomorrow.
My 6-year-old grandson has an advanced degree in law.
LikeLike
Good.
LikeLike
oh gosh, B-A, thanks for the giggles so early in the a.m. and oh my, i can’t begin to count the times i’ve mis-sent messages. our neighbor/friend teaches English as a Second Language and has many stories of misunderstandings. a young Asian student told him that he was innocently talking to a local and that person kept telling him he was “bad.” friend found out, thru careful questions, that the local was say “you bet” in agreement to what the student was saying and was being received as “you bad.”
reading will indeed be fun, tim
a gracious, cold, snowy, blustery, good morning to You All.
and indeed, an icky day to be moving. hope you had lots of help, Clyde.
LikeLike
Funny stuff, Beth Ann, although it makes me cringe. I used to be the one asked to do things on the basis of instructions that were a teeny bit less than complete. She’d say, “I just want you to do this one simple thing,” and that “just” was the clue meaning that she thought “any idiot stumbling along Hennepin avenue in an old overcoat clutching a bottle of Thunderbird in a sack could do this . . . but can you?”
tim’s response is funny, too! We all know people who can zone out, even while making eye contact.
I love Greg Brown’s way of expressing that:
I’m walkin’ with my baby but man I’m in china
china, chi-nay, far away
I’m talkin’ with my baby but mmm I’m in china
china, chi-nay, far away
I come in on the run from china
china, chi-nay, far away
I tried to hug my baby some, she’s in china
china, chi-nay, far away
O maybe somewhere down the line O china
china, chi-nay, far away
we’ll get back the same time from china
china, chi-nay, far away
or John Prine’s:
My body’s in this room with you just catching hell
While my soul is drinking beer down the road a spell
You might think I’m listening to your grocery list
But I’m leaning on the jukebox and I’m about half … way there
I’ll have more to say on this a bit later 😉
LikeLike
good song examples, Steve iSP
LikeLike
exactly
LikeLike
The “just” is another code word… 🙂
LikeLike
It took me a while to figure out what Greg was refering to regarding going to China. When you know someone, there are times when you know what they are going to say and you do have trouble resisting the tendency to go to China.
LikeLike
Another John Prine:
I just found out yesterday that Linda goes to Mars
Every time I sit and look at pictures of used cars
She’ll turn on her radio and sit down in her chair
And look at me across the room, as if I wasn’t there.
Oh my stars, my Linda’s gone to Mars
Well I wish she wouldn’t leave me here alone
Oh my stars, my Linda’s gone to Mars
Well, I wonder if she’d bring me something home.
LikeLike
oh, where to start? Theatre production is rife with such things, mostly because you have little time in which to get interns to produce something that has probably never been made before, that has to do something that was not what was originally intended. What could possibly go wrong. (the dress that ended up with the sleeves set into the neckline comes to mind-but that could happen to anyone).
Had a roommate who was the props master one summer who would end tales of these fiascos with the phrase-“am I speaking Japanese here????”
LikeLike
Yep.
A fellow theater guy and I end our stories with “You can’t make this up!”
I had a work study student a couple years ago that was so good (basically he was another ‘me’. Hah!) that he’s ruined it for anyone following… they can never compare.
LikeLike
Of course, then there are times the director (or designer) wants you to do something that so flies in the face of the laws of physics (not to mention the time/space continuum) that you think-I can’t possibly be understanding this correctly, there is no way any body in their right mind could be asking for_____. Then you remember where you are and that the phrase “in their right mind” has nothing to do with the current situation.
Heard tell of a Technical Director who when faced with this moment in a production meeting would say, “like Pontius Pilate, I wash my hands of it”
LikeLike
Beth-Ann’s examples suggest that a common source of bungled communications is a smart person who makes assumptions about what others know or could intuit about doing something. If I tell you that to tune your guitar you need to first take it out of its case, some people would find that condescendingly obvious but others would benefit from the more literal, complete instructions.
I used to pull my hair out when trying to work with my sister on her computer. She found everything to do with computers threatening and confusing. She could find the cup holder on her computer, for example, but was angry that Dell forgot to put in the CD drive.
She called me:
“Boy, I am mad. I wrote emails to literally every person I know on earth, and nobody has replied. NOBODY!”
“Okay, let’s take a look. I assume your computer is turned on.”
“I gotta have it turned on?”
“Well, yes, or it isn’t a computer. And then your email program needs to be running.”
“I gotta have the email program turned on?”
“(suppressed sigh) Yes. And, umm, Nancy, there should be a grey wire going from your computer to the outlet on the wall.”
“Yeah. I’ve got that wire. But it isn’t plugged in to anything. Should it be?”
“Nancy, that wire is the way email letters can get into your computer. Did you think the emails just dove out of the ether to take up life on your hard drive?”
“No need to get snotty about this. I’ve got other people who can advise me if you are going to be sarcastic.”
LikeLike
OT My sister has two boys, a lawyer and a contractor. The lawyer kid asked the contractor kid to design some “fun” in the home the lawyer was about to build. The resulting home has a crazy slide behind a secret door, a knight in armor who guards a secret passageway and a bedroom with a pirate ship in the ceiling.
That home has just come to the attention of the world and has “gone viral” on the internet. Look for a story about it in today’s Strib. I just love that slide. You dive in and corkscrew in circles for two stories in blackness before shooting out in the gym area of the basement.
LikeLike
wow
LikeLike
So very very cool…
LikeLike
I want I want I want!
LikeLike
I saw that in the Strib today. Cool!
LikeLike
I see by a diagram on my nephew’s site that it is “just” one story, not two for the curlicue slide. Let me tell you, though, when you are in there and it is dark all you see is sparks flying off your clothing. A great ride!
LikeLike
I’ve had basically that same conversation with my mother in law regarding her computer… The suppressed sigh-and usually a silent scream to the other partner and then we’d trade off…
LikeLike
Good morning to all:
Well, at least your son put on the clean underwear as he was told, Beth-Ann. It’s hard to imagine why he would need to be told to take off the ones he was wearing first. That’s very funny.
The communication problem that comes to my mind is one of getting school kids to follow my instructions when substitute teaching. I think they knew they were supose to quiet down when I ask them to do this, but most of the time they didn’t. They understood what I was saying, but didn’t understand that they should actually do what I asked. That was a communication problem I was never able to completely solve.
I did have a solution for a few really stubborn kids who would even refused to leave the classroom when I told them they had to go to the office because they wouldn’t behave. They finally decided to leave when I told them I would have some one come and get them if they didn’t go. Some times sending a very bad behaving kid to the office would get the other kids quieted down, but not always.
LikeLike
I should say that I did like substituting and some of the school kids said I was their favorite sub. I didn’t mind too much if the kids were a little loud. However, drawing the line between a little loud and too loud was a problem.
LikeLike
Thank you for being a substitute teacher. We appreciate you folks so much.
LikeLike
Great fun, Beth-Ann. I’ll be telling these to other people.
A friend and I were assembling one of those heavy duty plastic storage “closets” in her basement. We eventually got it together, but not necessarily because we read the instructions, which were apparently written by soneone for whom English is a second language. And they just got funnier and funnier; I wish we’d saved them so I could share the details. By the end we were absolutely rolling on the floor laughing, holding our bellies, tears running down our faces.
LikeLike
BiR – I’ve experienced this phenomenon as well. When I worked in the bookstore we would often receive big cardboard “dumps” from various publishers (never did figure out why they were called dumps) for displaying the latest and greatest. These were invariably difficult to assemble and following the directions never seemed to help! We kept old dumps in the back and sometimes just stuck the new header onto the old dump rather than try to put the new one together. Probably NOT what the publishers had in mind!
LikeLike
Funny, BiR! Maybe that could be a blogging topic some day. Like the Japanese hotel that invites its guests: “Please take advantage of our chambermaid.”
LikeLike
This is a funny, and I hope not too offensive story about miscommunication told me by a colleague 30 years ago, who had worked in an unnamed sexual dysfunction clinic in an unnamed location. A couple came to the clinic for treatment, and were told to take the sexual history forms home and fill them out. The history forms were quite comprehensive and detailed. A couple of days later, the therapist received a panicked phone call from one member of the couple, stating that they had done everything on the list and now the other spouse was threatening to leave, and what sort of treatment was this?
LikeLike
I suspect the mental process that facilitated turning a questionnaire into an instruction sheet involved a certain amount of…um…enthusiasm for the subject matter.
LikeLike
Or else extreme anxiety. My colleague wondered where on earth they got the dead body!
LikeLike
OMG.
LikeLike
Anybody care to guess the gender of the spouse that completed the list?
LikeLike
um, I suspect it was supposed to be a group project.
LikeLike
Oh I love your stories what a wonderful counterpoint to today’s weather! Keep ’em comin’!
LikeLike
In our house, we occasionally have discussions with Daughter about the difference between “hearing” and “listening”…Daughter is also still at an age where lyrics to songs take interesting turns, including her asking at one point (while watching Word Girl) what a “pizza crime” was – she had mis-heard part of the theme song, got it stuck in her head as “pizza crime” and then wanted to know what that might be (I’m thinking anything involving anchovies is a pizza crime, but that may be a matter of personal taste).
As a budding technical writer, one of the first lessons I learned was asking first what the anticipated level of understanding is/was for the user/reader and start the instructions from there. So Steve, with your sister, the instructions may have started with, “plug in your computer to the wall outlet” with a picture of the power cord – for the record, she is not alone, I wrote user manuals for field sales people that started with “Plug the power cord and adapter into your wall and computer, then press the power button located here ___”. Instructing my mother when she first switched to using Windows on her computer took some doing – the paradigm shift to “folders” and a “desktop” can be a bit befuddling. I tried to get her up to speed on Facebook, but she couldn’t get her head around writing on a “wall”…she’s sticking to email for now.
LikeLike
Facebook; my Mom also hasn’t figured out the ‘wall’ thing either; she’s always writing “I don’t know where this is going…..”
My son is a bit aghast that GRANDMA has a facebook page!
LikeLike
I love that young folks think they have a lock on the technology/social network world! I’m embarrassed to say that when I was MUCH younger, I was probably just as arrogant! OK, I know I as just as arrogant!
LikeLike
Anna, come sit by me and I will take care of those anchovies for you-love-’em!
I do think pictures of the various cords and sockets helps a lot-we recently had an embarassing incident in which we could not get the pictures from the digital camera to download (until we figured out we had the wrong cord plugged into the wrong something else-helps to look at the directions)
LikeLike
If you eat all my anchovies I will gladly provide you with step-by-step instructions with screen shots and pictures as needed. 😉
LikeLike
I was sort of hoping to trade you for the pepperoni I always seem to end up with.
LikeLike
I’ll eat the pepperoni – no problem. Just no anchovies (or olives).
LikeLike
olives here
great way to make the daleless day go by with so many smiles
LikeLike
I kept thinking I’d think of more non-messages, but I haven’t.
But OT, I’ve gotta ask, has anyone else read anything by Kevin Kling?? I’m reading The Dog Says How and I’m laughing out loud every 5 minutes, or at least snorting. Highly recommended.
LikeLike
BiR –haven’t read his books, but have seen two of his plays a the Children’s Theatre… Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse and Lyle Lyle Crocodile. I’ll have to give the books a try!
LikeLike
holiday inn is good too. he is at the history theater through this weekend with a play i hope to get to
LikeLike