I think we are suffering from a failure to communicate...

Another rainy Saturday, but at least we didn't get the insane amount of rain we got last Friday into Saturday. Last Friday, we got the equivalent of six feet of snow but in rain. According to the Super's wife - the basement had flooded - but they clearly managed to keep it from getting out of control. Since I didn't see any water damage when I was down there. So I think it may have been more where the boiler was and lower section. It's hard to text her - because English is her third language - her understanding is rudimentary at best.
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Sigh.

At work.
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I'm used to having to navigate being understood and understanding someone else - I've spent my entire life finding ways to ensure understanding between people.

98% of arguments are misunderstandings or miscommunications. Online, offline, everywhere. It's mostly miscommunication. Half of my job is navigating that. And half the debates and interactions on social media - are that. I just had two recently - and it was all about miscommunication and communication. And 90% of the ones at work are.

Part of the problem is everyone has their own language or perception of language or linguist quirks and slang. Or writing style. And from their perception - it's easy to understand. And perfect. But I always question mine. I can write in fifteen different styles as a result. I can write formally. I can write in legalese. I can write casual or informal as I am doing now. I can write in slang. I can write conversational English. What I can't do is write in a foreign language (well not any longer used to be able to write in French in my teens and twenties).

Did you know that some people can't read words in all CAPS (caps). Their eyes skip over the word as if it does not exist. Same with words in bold type, or italics or highlighted or underlined. Those words might as well not exist for them. While others need a word emphasized in bold or italics or highlighted, or they won't see it or understand the emphasis. And many people don't understand abbreviated words or emoticons, which a lot of folks on social media platforms and texting utilize. For example: LOL (laugh out loud), or ETA (Edited to Add or in business, Estimated Time for Arrival, also ETD - Estimated Time of Delivery). ;-) (isn't recognized by everyone or understood).

At work, a new employee sat down with me and asked me what a whole lost of abbreviations meant. I managed to fine over half of them for her.
And a Contractor asked: Please explain what SOGR means per station.
And I thought - that's defined in Attachment A - as State of Good Repair.
No, said the Contractor - what we're actually asking is what you mean by State of Good Repair, not what SOGR means.

See how easy it is to misunderstand what someone else is saying or writing?

Technology should have made this easier, but it hasn't in some respects.

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I see it over and over again - how people do various things to make it harder for others to understand them. It's almost as if they do not wish to be understood by everyone? I wish I could be - but I can't learn languages. I know I tried. Really hard. And failed miserably at it. Just don't have the facility for it. I think it is genetic. No one in my immediate family can learn a language fluently. We can read and write in it, just not really speak it effectively. Of course - there is something to be said for immersion.

I live in a city with over twelve million, and roughly half do not speak English well, if at all. I can't tell you which language among them is dominant. ( NYC the international melting pot of languages )

On a final note, when my father's mental capacity was slowly eroded by Alzheimer's, and he struggled to communicate - I realized he finally understood what I'd gone through early on yet had overcome, and what other's had. The pain of not being to get others to understand you. He understood us, but we could no longer understand him. He, who was a wordsmith, who could always write well and speak well, and had worked hard to be excellent at the written and spoken word - who had done lectures, and written books, could no longer do both effectively. His sentences rarely made sense, and he could no longer read or write.

Watching this was...horrifying to me. What we had in common was our mutual love of communication - we were both wordsmiths, we both valued communication and the ability to do it well. We were both trained in its arts. And ... he could not draw, he could not paint, he could not read, and he could barely speak. He made himself understood with a look, with a frown, with a groan, and often with his hands. And sometimes a garbled sentence or two. There were days he could put a paragraph together, but he would often end them by saying somewhat halting pushing each word out with effort - that his intelligence was going. He was losing it. Because to him - the intelligence was partly the means to communicate ideas to others, to be able to discuss them, question, and learn. And he was losing that.
And it was horrifying.

I don't know where I'm going with this ramble. I often don't. Hence the title spontaneous musings. I think it's just something that's been rumbling about in my brain of late...that I wish sometimes we weren't all suffering from a failure to communicate...but I honestly don't know how to fix it. Although I do keep trying. (Mainly because I'm stubbornly persistent.)

New Plaza..

Almost forgot to post this. Above, hopefully you can see it - I snatched it from FB, is a photo of our newly painted plaza on Beverly and MacDonald Avenue. This is in front of where I catch the subway, my pharmacy, and the fruit and vegetable store in the cross section of Little Bangladash, Little Russia, and Little Poland. I live about six blocks east of this plaza. It's a five to ten minute walk from my apartment.

They decided to turn the street that is between the Fruit and Vegetable store and the Pharmacy into a plaza. Mainly because school children were crossing there, and families were walking along it, while you'd have to deal with trucks, buses and other vehicles attempting to go down this narrow one way street. Or worse, trying to park in front of the stores along it. Making it difficult to cross.

So as a safety measure, to clean up the litter, and make the community a nicer space - they painted the street with a lovely or brightly colored mural and are putting in planters.

I think they went the cheap route. What they should have done is put in a plaza - with raised concrete, additional trash receptacles, and built in planters, trees and landscaping. That way no one can use it as a street ever again. The painting is kind of a mess. There's footprints of purple and pink paint all over the sidewalks, and it kind of blends in together.
Also they had two people doing it for a while - and all they did was chat.
Lots of chatting, not much painting - so it took three days.

That said? I'm happy about it. My city is wisely cutting on the car traffic and promoting pedestrian traffic. More and more roads are being cut off or changed into walkways, green space and plazas. The subways, ferries, buses and train lines are being expanded. There's more money and emphasis on infrastructure and public transportation, and less on parking and roads.
It's making for a safer, cleaner, less expensive city in various respects.
NYC is among the few places in the world in which you can literally go miles without driving a car. There's taxis, car services, trains, subways, buses, etc. It's a glorious place to live.