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

[shadowkat]

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.

Me: I put the keys in your mailbox. There's also a leak but not serious in the bathroom - but I think it is really above me?
Super's wife: We have so much. Flooding in basement. Jewish holidays. We will get to you. Tenant put keys in box when they need us to visit. I don't have time to pick up.
Me: Did you get my keys? I put them in your mailbox.
Super's wife: We don't have time to fix. Tenant puts keys in mailbox when make appointment for us to visit. We not ready, we will get to you.
Me: No, I put your copy of my apartment keys in your mailbox next to your door, on your stoop, no need to pick up. No need to fix leak in my apartment - it's fine. No worries.
Super: Oh okay, thank you.

Sigh.

At work.

Contractor: I didn't get (something something). And I (something something). For XYZ project.
Me: Okay, let's start again since I didn't understand what you said. What didn't you get?
Contractor: The meeting notice.
Me: And who are you again?
Contractor: (tells me his name).
Me: Your firm?
Contractor: (tells me).
ME: I sent it to you - here's the email address that I sent it too. It's the same one as before, and that was given to me. (I spell it out for him.)
Contractor: That should have gone through. I can give you mine, since that one didn't work or didn't go through.
Me: The meeting is starting soon, and I can barely understand you. Can you send me an email? I'll give you my email address - it may be easier? (He agrees - he can understand me but I can't understand him and I feel his frustration through the phone line). Also you declined on this project previously, and we aren't doing another site tour - and you didn't go to the first one.
Contractor: (garbled), we will send you the email. [Probably curious as to why we are rebidding.] Also this very mechanical, how can you do it without specific pricing, we aren't mechanical firm - why are we chosen?
ME: Well, that's why you declined. Look, I don't care why - you don't have to justify it to me. It's okay if you want to decline again. We're not rebidding it because of that.

See? The combination of a bad connection and a thick accent, made it difficult for me to understand him. And I totally understood his need to be understood - so I went out of my way to try and help him. Writing is often better - I've discovered that most people who have learned multiple languages, write better than they speak it. In some cases. The Super's wife actually may speak it better. I remind myself whenever I speak to her - that English is her third language. She speaks Polish and Russian best.

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.

We have coding language now - which not everyone knows, along with abbreviations, text-speak (which is stuff like IDK (I don't know) and IDEK (I don't even know), and LOL (laugh out loud), IKR (I know right?), and slang, etc. Add to all of that? Each software or hardware program has a different interface - so say you are in a group chat with friends, but all your friends have Google Phones or Android Phones, and you have the latest and greatest Iphone, you will be kicked out of their chat. It's not personal. Your hardware interface or whatever software that is installed on your phone isn't communicating with theirs. It's a failure in the tech. The people designing these phones want to be competitive - so they aren't communicating with each other and sharing what they are doing - as a result their apps don't work well together. They want everyone to buy their phone.

That's why group chats seldom work well. I refuse to do them, and rarely do them. I can with my family members - we all have iphones. But my friends and co-workers don't.

I'll give you a couple of examples of how this has blown up for me:

1. When we were told to work remotely for the pandemic, March 2020. My boss said - he'd text or call everyone to let us know if it was a go before the next morning.

Almost everyone in my group but me, got the text.

Why? My boss and the rest of the group had Android phones. I had an Iphone. My boss's text didn't get through to me.

As a result - I went in to work the next day, when we were being told to go into "Shelter in Place". I was furious at my boss, but is my well have been a flaw in tech.

2. I was in a group chat with a support group, and I kept getting kicked out. They shared stuff in that chat, and I was excluded. It was because they all had android phones and were using the same chat app, and my message app wasn't communicating with it.

A friend on FB mentioned how she kept getting kicked out of her group chats, and others commented on how lucky she was - they wished they could get kicked out.

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. It's not Spanish, or if it is - it's variations of the language. In my apartment building alone we have over five different languages. I've heard: Korean, Chinese, Bengali, Hindu, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, and some others in there. The area is home to: Latin American Immigrants (Mexico, Venezuela, Columbia, Cuba, Spain), Russian, Ukraine, Russian Jew (Yiddish), Polish, Italian, French, Bengali (Bangladesh), Pakistan, India (Hindu), Caribbean (Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad), Nigerian, British Isles, Portugal, German, Japanese, Vietnamese, Phillipino, and Native American.

I love this. This is the thing I love most about where I live. How insanely diverse it truly is. Nowhere else is quite as diverse as this city. It's a city of immigrants or nomads - everyone at some point in time is from elsewhere, whether they want to see that or not.

And what I've noticed in NYC is how much effort is made to be understood by as any people as possible. They post signs and posters in five different languages. Everything at the bank and subways is in five different languages. They even use pictures to communicate. The writing is clear and black on white paper. It's not overly creative. The lettering is easy to read and in a good font. My work place insists on Calibre font for public announcements. Or Times New Roman. Nothing too fancy.

This city is the communications capital of the world for a reason - it makes an effort. It communicates in multiple languages. News conferences always have a hearing impaired interpreter at them now. If the Governor or Mayor speaks, there is an ASL or sign language specialist next to them, paid by the State or City. They have closed captioning, and Spanish language channels.

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.)

Comments

[wendelah1]

Watching this was...horrifying to me.

It is. It really is. Such a terrible disease, for the person who is suffering it, and for their families and friends.

Something somewhat similar happened to Kyle while he was dying from cancer. He was unable to do any of the things he loved: reading, writing, even walking, of course. That was the first thing to go. He couldn't even listen to music--not classical or jazz or folk or even rock 'n roll--it frustrated him, I think because he couldn't understand it.

It was painful to watch, it's painful to remember.

[shadowkat]

My brother and I kind of are dealing with it in the same way, I guess. We try not to focus on it or think about it.

But I do remember. Mother tries as well. She is addicted to playing a Maijon on the internet now.

Losing someone in pieces in that way, and watching them lose pieces of themselves and the things they loved, and made them who they are...is horrifying. I'm reading a book now that isn't about that exactly - not dementia, but it does use a lot of horrifying imagery to get across what it is like to watch and lose someone to cancer. I'm finding it hard to read at times, because of that.

[mtbc]

R. has noticed that people can look tense when she approaches, then relax when she speaks; she surmises they're relieved her English is intelligible.

I prefer written mostly because, despite having good hearing, I have unusual difficulty in translating those sounds to words, my father had the same issue. Still, in my previous job, which was much more text-based messaging, I would face customers (not native speakers) asking things like, What is the job exactly for the colonial service in [our software]? and I'd think what? and go off to an internal channel to discuss WTF they might be actually asking.

[shadowkat]

Language barriers can be difficult to get around. I'm used to people who look like me not speaking English. There's a lot of tall, white, folks of European descent in NYC who do not know English or speak it fluently. And many of them live in my building or surrounding neighborhood. Also they have a tendency to expect me to be able to understand theirs - which is very odd.

Writing is easier - because sounds can get muffled, I think. Also, you have time to get an answer from someone who knows the answer. "Colonial service"? What were they referring to? That makes no sense. Do people still colonize? It sounds like a science fiction novel.