Tag Archives: communication

Communication Failure

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Someone’s communication skills need work.

This morning, while going through my email, I found two messages sent three minutes apart by the same person using the contact form on the Flying M Air website.

4:50 PM:

I have 3000 hours helicopters and airplanes. Loving opportunity to meet with someone

4:53 PM:

I have 3000 hours and helicopters and fixed wing I would love an opportunity to speak with someone.

The form offers a place for the person trying to contact me to include his name and phone number, which he did.

My questions:

  • If he wanted to talk to someone and it was within normal business hours, why didn’t he just pick up the damn phone and call? “Speaking” means either using the phone or arranging a face-to-face meeting. It doesn’t mean sending an email message. The contact form page includes both of Flying M Air’s phone numbers, right at the top under the heading “By Phone.” It seems to me that although he said he would “love an opportunity to speak to someone,” he had that opportunity then and still has it right now. In fact, anyone with a phone has that opportunity when the phone number is right there in front of their face. Maybe his phone doesn’t dial out?
  • What did he want to talk about? He’s a pilot — probably not a potential client. What would motivate me to call him? He never said what he wanted to talk about. And no, I’m not interested in calling pilots I don’t know to chat about flying and careers with them. Read this blog. Don’t you think I’m a little busy with other things? Don’t you think I’m entitled to spend my time on things that are important to me and my business?

  • By Email
    This paragraph appears right above the contact form this person used to email me.

    Did he want to talk to someone about a job? If so, he also managed to miss the Help Wanted link right above the email form. If he had clicked that, he would see that Flying M Air is not hiring pilots unless those pilots can come to Washington with a helicopter for a month starting in June to dry cherries. And if he had a helicopter, why wouldn’t he mention that?

So what am I supposed to do? He says he’d like the opportunity to speak to someone. He has it. He didn’t ask me to call. He didn’t tell me what it was about. He didn’t give me any reason to get in touch with him. I’m not even motivated to answer his email message.

And yes, I’m ranting. How could I not rant when I’m faced with such bullshit?

Today’s 5:44 AM Phone Call

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A drawback of having just one phone for business and personal use.

Early MorningThe phone rang at 5:44 AM.

I was still in bed, but awake and reading. I’d slept great, hitting the sack at about 10:00 the night before and sleeping soundly until about 5:30 — close to eight hours of uninterrupted rest! My “morning routine” starts in bed, reading and sometimes doing a crossword puzzle on my iPad until it starts getting light outside. I was in the reading phase of that routine when the phone rang.

No one likes getting a phone call “in the middle of the night.” Now I know it wasn’t the middle of the night, but it was early enough to make me wonder what was important enough to call someone when they’re likely to be sleeping — obviously an emergency.

The phone said the call was from “Palmdale Area.” I only know one Palmdale, and it’s in California. In the seconds before answering, I consulted the database in my brain, trying to think of who in California would be calling me so damn early. One of my frost clients, maybe?

“Flying M, Maria speaking.” That’s the way I answer the phone when the call is either from a known client or an unknown caller.

The person on the other end seemed mildly surprised that I’d answered. “Is this Maria? Did I get you up?”

“Yes, it’s Maria but no, you didn’t get me up. Who is this?”

“Oh, this is Joe. I’m in Wickenburg right now.”

Joe is the name of the man who was gracious enough to offer me his house for the winter while he went to Arizona. (Well, it isn’t really Joe, but neither was the caller’s name. I’m hiding their identities for privacy sake. The names were the same.) Wickenburg was the town I used to live in in Arizona. Although it didn’t really sound like the Joe I know, I assumed it was him and that he’d come to Wickenburg and needed something from me, a former resident.

Of course, that assumption quickly evaporated as the caller hurried on. “I understand you used to run the FBO here. I emailed you the other day. I need a helicopter here.”

I remembered his email. Like most of the other email I get from people who have contacted me from Flying M Air’s website — where it clearly says I no longer operate in Arizona — I’d deleted his message. My bad.

“I don’t operate in Arizona anymore,” I said, starting to lose my patience. (How much patience do you have at 5:44 AM, less than 10 minutes after you’ve woken up?) “I don’t know of any operator in the area who can help you.”

I was ready to hang up but he wasn’t.

“Well, I need a helicopter here and was hoping you could refer me to someone who has one.”

“I was the only commercial helicopter operator in Wickenburg,” I told him. “I never had enough work to support my business there. I doubt whether anyone else would be stupid enough to start another helicopter charter business in that town.”

“Yeah, but maybe an ag ship? Something like that that I might be able to get my hands on?”

I might have laughed into the phone. “There are no ag ships in that area. There’s no agriculture in Wickenburg.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

I wanted to get off the phone and, at about this point, I started thinking about just hanging up on him. Seriously: I was that annoyed. But I really don’t want to be rude to people.

“You might try one of the operators down in Phoenix,” I told him.

“Yeah, I guess I could do that.” A pause, then: “Hey, did you hurt your foot about six years ago?”

Convinced I hadn’t heard him right, I said, “Excuse me?”

“Did you hurt your foot about five or six years ago?”

“No,” I replied.

“Okay.” Another pause. “Well cherry drying work must be doing pretty good for you up there.”

I couldn’t believe it. This guy called me at a quarter to six in the morning and was trying to have a conversation with me. “It’s fine,” I told him. I sat up in bed. Nature was making its first call of the day. I wanted to be off the phone. “Listen,” I said, “Do you realize that it’s a quarter to six in the morning?”

“Well, I’ve been up for two hours.”

“Maybe you might want to wait until at least eight before calling people?”

“Yeah, but I’m Florida and I run on east coast time. It’s nine o’clock there.”

I thought to myself: Who the hell cares what time zone you operate on? You called someone in Washington. But I said: “I really can’t help you. Sorry.”

“Okay. Goodbye.”

I heard him disconnect before I was able to push the end button.

I guess it’s time to revisit the Do Not Disturb feature on my phone.

Twitter and Writing

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Some thoughts on a New Yorker essay.

Twitter LogoI read an interesting essay on the New Yorker magazine’s website yesterday: “The Ongoing Story: Twitter and Writing.” It was one of those pieces that, as you read it, you realize that you and the author are sharing the same thoughts about something that you thought you were alone in thinking. As I read through the piece, I found myself wanting to highlight different passages of it — the parts of it where the author put into words what I’d been thinking or feeling for a long time.

So I figured I’d blog a little about it to store those thoughts here.

For example, the author of the piece, Thomas Beller, writes:

Most great writers could, if they wanted to, be very good at Twitter, because it is a medium of words and also of form. Its built-in limitation corresponds to the sense of rhythm and proportion that writers apply to each line.

And that’s the challenge of Twitter. Sharing a complete thought in 140 characters. I wrote about that back in October 2010 (was it really that long ago?) in my blog post titled “How Twitter Can Help You Become a More Concise Writer.” After all, anyone can write a string of tweets to tell a story. But how many people can convey that story in just 140 characters? How many people can be interesting, funny, provocative, witty, sarcastic, ironic, or insightful?

Yes, it’s true: I do tweet photos of some of my meals. (Don’t we all?) But occasionally I get more serious. Occasionally I dig deeper and come up with something witty or profound, something that other people find worthy of retweeting or, better yet, favoriting.

(Ever wonder how the word favorite became a verb? I did, too. Then I asked all-knowing Google and it pointed me to this article that explains it. It shouldn’t surprise you that Twitter is involved. But once again, I digress.)

And sometimes — just sometimes — I can paint a visual picture with those 140 characters that’s as clear as a glacial stream on a spring day.

Two more passages touch upon why and how I use Twitter:

Does a piece of writing that is never seen by anyone other than its author even exist? Does a thought need to be shared to exist? What happens to the stray thought that drifts into view, is pondered, and then drifts away? Perhaps you jot it down in a note before it vanishes, so that you can mull it over in the future. It’s like a seed that, when you return to it, may have grown into something visible. Or perhaps you put it in a tweet, making the note public. But does the fact that it is public diminish the chances that it will grow into something sturdy and lasting? Does articulating a thought in public freeze it in place somehow, making it not part of a thought process but rather a tiny little finished sculpture? Is tweeting the same as publishing?

And:

I had always thought of Twitter as being a good place to work out ideas: a place to mull things over in public, and a way of documenting a thought to make it more likely that I would remember it. But is it like a conversation or is it “talking it out?” Is it a note to oneself that everyone can see, or is it, like iPhone photos, an attempt to offload the responsibilities of memory onto an apparatus that feels like an extension of ourselves because it is always in our hands? I sometimes wonder if I might ever be accused of stealing my own idea.

And that’s how I use Twitter: as a sort of running list of my thoughts and the things going on in my life. (That might explain why I’ve tweeted more than 44,000 times since I joined Twitter back in 2007. I think a lot and keep pretty busy.) It’s easy to whip out my phone or iPad and tweet something that’s on my mind — or to save a picture of what’s in front of me in a place where it’ll be forever (or at least a long time). It is an offloading of information so I don’t have to remember things.

Mr Beller wonders whether articulating a thought in public freezes it in place somehow. It does. It freezes it in the Twitter archive, which I can download for my account and search at any time. (How do you think it was so easy for me to come up with the tweets you see here? Imagine that archive in the hands of a paranoid and delusional stalker!) That makes it possible for me to go back in time, to see what I was thinking and doing on a specific date since my first tweet in March 2007.

I can’t think of any easier way to make life notes. Stray thoughts can be captured before they drift away, to be pondered at my leisure. And sometimes — just sometimes — they become the seeds for blog posts or conversations with friends.

Twitter was introduced as a “microblogging” service and that’s exactly how I use it. I assume other writers do the same.

But is tweeting the same as publishing? I don’t think so. It’s more like standing on a soapbox in a crowded park, making random remarks. Some folks who know you’re there and find you interesting might be there to listen. But otherwise, your words go mostly unheard. You can argue that the same can be said for publishing, but publishing seems to be a more legitimate form of communication. Or maybe that’s just old-fashioned thinking on my part.

Managing the anxiety of composition is an essential part of writing. One must master the process of shepherding the private into public. There are bound to be false starts, excursions that turn out to be dead ends. But these ephemera—notes, journals, drafts—are all composed in a kind of psychic antechamber whose main feature is a sense of aloneness. They are the literary equivalent of muttering to yourself in a state of melancholy, or of dancing in front of the mirror with music blasting when you are alone in your room. Both of these are best done when no one is home.

I’ve never found it difficult to write; there is no anxiety for me. That’s not to say that I don’t have false starts and wander down to dead ends. Or, more often than I’d like to admit, write crap.

There is an aloneness to all writing, including Twitter. And yes, tweets are like talking to yourself, but with the very real possibility that (in my case) 1600+ people are listening and may respond. No one is home here except me — I’ve been alone for a long time, even when I supposedly wasn’t.

Almost everybody who is a writer these days gets, at some point, a lecture on the necessity of being “on” Twitter and Facebook. It’s a tool of selling and career building. It is, for writers of all ages and stages, not so much required reading as required writing.

I also got this lecture from one of my publishers. I didn’t need to be sold on Twitter — I took to that like a bird takes to the sky. It was Facebook that I avoided for as long as I could. So long, in fact, that I lost a contract because I wasn’t involved enough in social media. Imagine that! An early adopter of Twitter with tens of thousands of tweets not being involved enough in social media.

Twitter gives writers the ability to put ourselves out there for the world to see. Does it help my writing career? Perhaps — to a point. It certainly helps attract blog readers and give me a steady stream of intelligent people to communicate with.

After five years and more than 44,000 tweets, I know one thing for certain: Twitter has become a part of my writing life.

In Defense of Text Messaging

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It does serve a real purpose.

The other day, one of my Twitter/Facebook friends linked to an article in the New York Times titled “How Not to Be Alone.” In his words, it was “highly recommended.” So I read it.

The piece started out with a story about seeing a 15-year-old girl crying into a cell phone during a discussion with her mother. The story went on for four paragraphs, with the author, Jonathan Safran Foer, using his fifth paragraph to discuss his moral dilemma: talk to this stranger to try to comfort her or “respect the boundaries” between them. He never does say what he chose to do.

From there, the article launches into a discussion of how modern day methods of communication are dividing us, weakening our relationships, reducing our ability to articulately communicate, and making it easier to “avoid the emotional work of being present” to communicate. He argues that by diminishing our communication with others, we diminish ourselves.

He says:

We often use technology to save time, but increasingly, it either takes the saved time along with it, or makes the saved time less present, intimate and rich. I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts. It’s not an either/or — being “anti-technology” is perhaps the only thing more foolish than being unquestioningly “pro-technology” — but a question of balance that our lives hang upon.

I read through the article twice without coming away with a one-line summary of what he was trying to say. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one having trouble with it because another Twitter friend replied to me and someone else with the simple — thank you, Twitter! — summary:

Don’t write when you can call. Don’t call when you can visit.

Simple enough. And I can certainly agree.

But it got me thinking about text messaging and the way it seemed to be painted, in the Times piece, as something that’s destroying society. And that bugged me.

Because I just don’t think it’s true.

Text Messaging for Work

You see, I use text messaging extensively for work. It gives me the ability to communicate instantly with clients and colleagues about things that they might want to know about right now. The key word there is might. If they must know about it now, I call their cell phone. But why bother them with a call when they might or might not be interested with the information I have to share? Or if I need an answer to a question but I don’t need it immediately — and know I will likely forget to ask if I do make a call later?

Here’s an example. My summer work requires me to be on call to fly over cherry orchards after it rains. The other day, there was rain in the area. I watched it move through on radar on my iPad. I saw it approaching an area where one of my clients has an orchard. I know he doesn’t live near there. I wanted to make sure he knew I was monitoring the weather and had some concerns about his orchard. So I texted:

Do you have someone at Malaga?

That was at 4:30 PM. His response came at 5:34 PM, after the weather had moved through:

Yeah. We made it through another close afternoon.

Communication accomplished. I didn’t have to call him to pester him with my question. He’s been growing cherries a lot longer than I’ve been drying them with a helicopter. I’m sure he had a handle on it. But by sending that quick text message, I communicated that I was aware of the situation and would be ready if he needed me. The fact that he didn’t respond for over an hour was okay with me. For all I know, he might not have even looked at his phone for an hour. He might have been busy watching the weather.

Do I communicate by text with all of my clients? No. Only the ones who have shown that they use text messaging to communicate by texting me first. When a client texts me, he’s telling me that texting is an acceptable or maybe even preferred means of communication. I’m okay with that.

I’m Not Alone

The title of the piece suggests that modern communication is making us more alone. I disagree wholeheartedly. If anything, text messaging has brought me closer to friends.

This morning, for example, while I was still in bed at 4:15 AM, I texted a friend on the east coast — where it was 7:15 — with a question. If he saw it immediately, great. If not, that was okay, too. He’d eventually see it and respond. But he was there at his desk and we had a text “conversation” about a bunch of things.

You might argue that when I realized he was available I should have picked up the phone and called him. But my friend works from home and uses his phone extensively for work. Chances are, our conversation would have been interrupted one or more times by incoming phone calls. Was our texted conversation important enough to disrupt his work day? No.

Although texting suggests a sort of immediacy to the conversation, it also makes it possible to put down and resume a conversation over time. Indeed, I’ve had texted “conversations” with people that have gone on for hours or days or even weeks. Could I accomplish this with phone calls? No — not without becoming a nuisance.

I can’t tell you how many friendships — including very old friendships — I have been able to maintain via text messaging and email. Sometimes it’s the best option.

The Trouble with Phone Calls

The problem with using the phone is that when you call someone, you’re saying, in effect, that it’s okay for you to bother him/her when it’s convenient for you. After all, you don’t usually call someone when it isn’t convenient for you, do you?

Of course, you can always schedule a phone call. Some of my publishing contacts do that. It makes sense. Take a meeting, on the phone.

But calling out of the blue? When someone might be busy? Just to chat?

I guess it depends on the kind of relationship you have with that person. I have plenty of friends who I feel comfortable calling to chat — at certain times of the day or evening. But if I don’t know a person very well, I think it’s rude to bother him/her with a phone call just to say hello.

Is that making me more alone? Not when I can fire off a quick text that might lead to a phone call when it’s convenient for both of us. Indeed, sometimes I’ll send a text message that says,

Are you around? Okay if I call?

Even if I don’t get a response, I get an answer to those questions: No.

Of course, this is assuming the person I want to reach lives with his/her cellphone at arm’s length all day every day. But that’s the kind of people I’m most likely to text anyway.

I’m not texting my mother or sister or a friend who keeps his cell phone packed away in a little backpack he uses as a manly man purse. (You know who you are!) I’m just texting the same people who text me.

In Person Meetings

When I was a kid, I’d go to my Aunt’s house in a nearby town. It aways amazed me how we’d be sitting around in the kitchen — the focal point for any Italian-American household — and one of her neighbors would walk right in. Often without even knocking on the door!

I’d love to live somewhere with all my friends nearby and be able to keep my doors unlocked at all times so they could walk right in and visit me. But that’s not my reality these days. Is it yours?

My world is bigger — my friends can be found all over the globe. They’ve chosen to live where they live just as I’ve chosen to live where I live. That doesn’t mean I won’t have super friendly neighbors when I finally build my new home. But I don’t really expect anyone to just “drop in” like we did in the old days.

Does that make me alone? I don’t think so. It makes me more likely to get out and about to get the social interaction I need with a wider variety of people in a wider variety of places.

So rather than sit around the kitchen table and wait for the same handful of visitors my Aunt’s family got, I’m getting out and expanding my world.

In Defense of Text Messaging

I’m not a kid. I’m in my 50s.

When I was a kid, we had three options for communication: face to face, telephone (which could be expensive if calling out of your immediate area), and mail (which took 2-3 days each way).

Today, we still have all of these things. Telephone use has become cheaper, mail has become more expensive. But we also have several free (or arguably low-cost) means of communication: fax (which is now, thankfully, almost dead), email, text messaging, and video conferencing. (And don’t get me started on self-publishing options — like social networking, blogging, print on demand, and ebooks — that make communication to the masses amazingly easy and cost effective.)

I can now communicate instantly for next to nothing with my friends and colleagues all over the world. I couldn’t do that when I was a kid.

I don’t understand how someone can argue that having and using more methods of communication — especially instantaneous, real-time methods — makes us more alone. If anything, it helps us connect better.

And text messaging is just one tool for doing that.

Your thoughts? Put ’em in comments so we can discuss.

Communication Breakdown, Part II

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How could he not understand?

I wrote a a post back in September about a breakdown in communication between two people who had been living together for a long time and the breakup and heartbreak it caused. Obviously, the story was not as hypothetical as it was written. Twenty nine years is a long time. I still can’t understand how he could throw it all away — especially when things were finally getting good again.

I think he tried to communicate with me today. How? Well, we had to swap trucks. Despite the fact that he told me I could keep his truck in the divorce settlement — both verbally and in writing — he changed his mind. I fetched the truck from Washington a while back. Although my lawyer offered him the keys, he ignored that and took his demand to the court. (I did mention that he had a problem with communication, no?) The result was a truck swap this afternoon. He got his Chevy back and I got my Ford back. Whatever.

I didn’t notice his attempt at communication until I got home. I was taking my things out of the truck and noticed some papers folded up under the center console. I opened them up and found an odd collection of email messages from me, as well as a tweet I wrote to @MikeTRose yesterday in response to one of his replies to me:

The emails may have been his attempt to explain why he hated me. That’s the way I saw it. But when I read the emails, I could see no reason to hate. All I could see was my attempt to communicate the level of frustration I was feeling from his actions. I loved him but he was driving me nuts.

It seems that every time I pointed out a problem with our relationship, he took it personally and just sulked about it. He kept all those old emails and printed them out and left them in my truck when we swapped trucks today. Who keeps emails from four years ago? Why the hell didn’t he just talk it out with me then? This is what I don’t understand.

We had such a freaking good life together — an enviable life. He was — note the use of past tense — a great partner. What the hell happened to him? When did he forget that life is for living?

For example, back in 2008, when I was doing helicopter tours at Lake Powell (making really good money, I might add), he scheduled a trip back to New York to visit his family. Not only did we have a dog back home that needed to be cared for, but his aged horse had become seriously ill. He expected me to drop everything and return early to watch the dog and care for the horse. My email response summarized why I thought he was being unreasonable. After all, couldn’t he have scheduled that trip for another time? I’d be home in a week or two anyway.

Is that worth hating me for? I don’t think so.

(He wound up leaving anyway. Our neighbor was present when the vet put his horse down. I came back from Lake Powell for a few days to take care of things at home. But I don’t get any credit for any of that.)

In another message, which also showed part of what I was replying to, we both lamented about feeling alone while I was away, working in Washington. Yet for years, he’d spent a full week (or more) every single month in New Jersey, leaving me in Arizona to care for the house, dog, horses, and chickens. Add that up and you get three months a year — about the same amount of time I spent in Washington that year. Later, he spent four days every week living in his condo in Phoenix — that’s more than half of his time — when I was home in Wickenburg. Yet back in 2010, he apparently expected me to sacrifice the business I was building to keep him company. I complained that I wasn’t interested in staying home to watch the animals and cook his meals, just to be rewarded with an evening of television every night.

Is that worth hating me for? I don’t think so.

The rest of the messages were in the same vein. I was working hard away from home, building my business — a business he promised to join me in. I spent a ton of money buying an RV that was big enough to house him, me, and our dog when he turned 55 (last year) and hit the road with me for half the year. I built up my cherry drying contracts and brainstormed for ways we could work together to make money. He even got his helicopter rating so he could ferry the aircraft while I drove the trailer when we were in transit.

But when the time came, he made excuses not to join me. I waited, hoping he’d change his mind. Instead, he waited for me to leave this summer, got a membership on Chemistry.com, and was sleeping with another woman a month later.

Yes, I trusted a man who let me down, cheated on me, and then lied to me. Yes, I’m a chump. Hell, I trusted him. Wouldn’t you trust someone you’d lived with for 29 years?

Is that worth hating me for? I don’t think so.

But what I still don’t understand is why he thinks he should hate me for wanting a better life for both of us. For working hard to make it happen.

And I can’t understand how he could give up on us — especially after asking me to see a marriage counsellor to help patch things up — when we were on the verge of getting everything right again. He finally had his dream job with travel for two of us and a work-from-home schedule. I could see the light at the end of the tunnel he’d been in with a long string of unsatisfying jobs. I could see blue skies and smooth air ahead.

But I guess he didn’t want the woman he’d spent more than half of his life with. The woman who’d taken care of him and made a home for him all those years. The woman who had introduced him to motorcycling, horseback riding, flying. The woman who shared her things with him — horses, trailers, jet skis. I guess it was time to dump the woman who spoke out when she wasn’t happy in favor of the first new woman who slept with him and agreed with everything he said.

Yes, baby. Whatever you want.

That’s not me. And the man who wants that is not a man I want to live with.

I just wish he’d been more of a man when he ended our relationship. A real man would have done it in person, before he started sleeping around. This man is a lying, cheating coward who can’t even talk to me, face to face, when he’s alone with me in person. Instead, he leaves old email messages hidden away in my truck for me to find and read when he’s not around.

And who hates me for reasons I still don’t understand.