You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Communication Break Down.
It’s a Led Zeppelin classic.
It’s also a building block for civilization.
My favorite book in the world; Merriam Webster says Communication is : the act or process of using words, sounds, signs, or behaviors to express or exchange information or to express your ideas, thoughts, feelings, etc., to someone else
That’s it.
Do that sentence right, you will find success.
Stray off message, and you got yourself a catfish dinner cooked on too low a heat.
When the message get through, it’s spectacularly efficient. It’s a crisp slant pattern good for a 1st down. It keeps the chains moving, the drive alive, the clock running.
But sometimes the message gets lost like an old pair of jeans at a college laundromat.
That’s communication for you. It wears a lot of hats.
It’s a blue fedora, it’s a green beret, it’s a white cowboy hat.
When we think of communication, most of us think of verbalizing our thoughts through words. The things you say. The things you don’t say. The way you say what you say. The way you don’t say what you want to say. Words can be sharp and precise. They can cut your heart out of your chest and punch you in the face. Words can be eloquent like a symphony or bludgeoned like a meat cleaver. Sentences can fall flat like Rosanne Barr singing the National Anthem, or they can embellish like the star at the top of your Christmas Tree. Words can exaggerate, like a thief in the night. They can have hidden meaning like a trap door. They can be overt like linguistic hand grenades.
But so much of communication is non verbal.
The way you stand, the way you cock your head, the way blink, breathe, hold your hands.
A wink to someone you like.
A nod to someone you respect.
A salute to someone you out rank.
A furled brow to the guy who took your parking spot.
A sheepish grin to the girl you want to ask out.
A shrug of the shoulders when you don’t care what the question is.
A roll of the eyes from a teenage girl to a mother who is asking her recalcitrant daughter to pick up her clothes.
Not a word needs to be spoken.
An eye roll from a 15-year-old speaks volumes.
And then there is the new millennium array of telecommunication possibilities.
Texting and emailing and Instant messaging, all have the power to instantaneously inform and mislead.
There’s Twitter and Facebook and instagram and snap chat.
This is where technology can turn communication into an Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom episode.
It’s the wild west of lost ideas, missed concepts, meanings that crawl into the ether to die.
You can write a happy text message with a smile.
But it can be received and perceived with a frown.
Texting has no frame of reference.
A few characters, mispelled, abbreviated.
It’s Dr. Frankenstein’s monster waiting to come to life.
Unless there is a happy face or an LOL, text messages are often so esoteric, the lost perception becomes reality.
I once got a text from a person who said “do you know where Patrick is?”
I didn’t respond for a bit.
When I did i wrote, back: “you find him”
I meant to put a question mark on the end of the sentence. Instead I got lazy. I left it blank.
My sentence should have read “You find him?” Instead it read YOU FIND HIM
The recipient got that text and perceived it angrily.
The sentence was missing a simple ?
Sometimes that’s all it takes.
I will later hear the recipient said, Andy is a jerk.”
It was a question with care and thought and concern.
I forgot a question mark.
Suddenly I’m stating a fact, ordering her to FIND HIM.
She was mad.
I had no idea.
It was a miscommunication of the new millennium kind.
I was in a bar once, and a man comes up to me and says, “You’re a F***ing A**Hole.”
I smile at him.
The communication is verbal. It is so direct, it’s hard to misinterpret.
I smile at him some more, waiting for him to smile too.
I’m responding to his verbalized communication with some non verbal body language.
You see I figure this has to be a joke.
OK, I’m a F***ing A**hole, sure thing buddy. How you doing? That’s what my toothy grin is trying to convey to this mutton chop.
I wait and wait. But the smile never comes.
The guy is fuming, and I detect he’s been a steady consumer of the happy hour specials.
My smile fades. I suddenly figure this is going to end badly and the less I smile, the less my teeth will be a target for his misguided anger.
“What’s your problem?” I ask feeling a little adrenaline rush.
“I sent you an email and you never emailed me back.”
I stare the guy. He is is fuming.
An email. He’s pissed about an email he sent. I am bewildered.
“What email?”
“I sent you an email about a problem I had and asked for your help and you never got back to me. You’re an A**Hole.”
I stare at the guy. I look for physical signs of escalation.
Are his fists clenched? Are his teeth gnashing each other. Is his chest pumping up.
“I didn’t get it,” I say, wondering what the hell he’s talking about.
“you got it!” he says.
“How do you know I got it? Maybe it’s in a spam folder?”
“Yeah, I figured you say that?” he says.
“get out of my face, man”
We separate, but it’s not good.
I sit at the bar, not far from the loud mouth. I want to go over and slug him. I don’t. Either way my night is ruined.
I think about the gall to come up to someone and get irate with him over a lost email.
Did he send it? Did I dismiss it? Did I delete it? Did it go to a junk folder?
Communication is the key to humanity.
We speak and we need to speak clearly.
But so often our words are lost, replaced by a grunt, a shrug, an eye roll.
And now it is a text with a slow response of limited scope and emotional depth.
Communication.
It’s an art. It’s a skill. It’s a necessity.
Life’s Crazy™