Enigmastation.com

I hate you people who use voicemail to say “call me.” I also hate you morons who say “hey, can you come by? I want to talk to you” in the office. All of you need to have a baseball bat applied to your grey matter.

Both statements are really common, and they’re offensive. If you have something you want someone to listen to later, give them what it was you wanted them to listen to.

“Your grandmother is sick.” That’s a good voice mail message (with sad content, but still.)

“We need to talk about changing your work hours.” That’s a good inter-office request for a meeting. (Maybe not with positive implications, but still!)

I get burned by this crap all the time. When someone says “hey, I need to talk to you,” my mind immediately runs through possibilities: did I do something wrong? Did something bad happen? Did someone die? Am I getting a pay cut? Is the company shutting down? Am I getting fired? Is someone sick? Is there a rumor going around that’s negative and affects me?

WHAT IS IT?!?!

It might be nothing, right? It might be neutral or even be positive. But I’d far rather be surprised by good news than bad, so I naturally and innately run through possibilities just in case.

See, this happened at work one time too. I initiated a meeting. When I did so, I didn’t say “Hey, I want to talk to you about something,” I went to my manager and said “I would like to talk to you about this,” where “this” was a specific subject. He immediately said, “well, you should talk to your immediate super about it,” which was fine and correct.

Do you see what’s happened right there? If I’d left off the actual subject and request, he wouldn’t have known and we’d have wasted a meeting.

So I went to the guy I was supposed to talk to about it. We then set up a meeting to talk about it a few days later.

But he screwed me over, badly: he assumed my subject was the discussion. Thirty seconds in, he tells me “no,” and hands me a piece of paper that formed the basis of his saying “no” – a “performance improvement plan.”

Note that we didn’t talk about it. He assumed a whole bunch of things about what I might have wanted, and didn’t think that maybe I had thought about it myself. So I went in thinking “this might be better for all of us if we all agree” and he didn’t even listen to me.

I was mad at him about it, too; insulted, but that’s secondary. He got bit by the other side of this stupid “hey, call me” culture (and bit me in return.) He was so used to people stringing others along that when someone did not string him along, he figured that’s all there was to it.

“Surely if there was more to it, he’d have said so initially instead of requesting a meeting in which we would talk.”

That’s a completely flawed assumption. It’s sort of understandable if you accept the circumstances that created it: a one-hit culture where nothing is allowed to be deep, and nothing carries forward.

It’s madness. This lack of depth is cruel and stupid.

One of the “performance improvement plan” points was that I didn’t respond quickly enough on the phone, okay? But the only times that I didn’t respond on the phone were when I didn’t get the phone call – they had this tendency to call me when I was in transit and thus unavailable, you understand.

So when I landed, if they mentioned something actionable, I took care of it. The week I got the “performance improvement plan,” there was this exact circumstance: they called me at boarding time, and left a message that something was down and had a problem. So when I landed, at 2:30 the next morning I was fixing it.

That  had happened other times, too: they’d call after hours and if I couldn’t fix it then, I was in the office before anyone else was, to correct things.

But the perception was that I was unresponsive, formed by the very moment of leaving a message, and when they wrote up the “performance improvement plan,” they didn’t think, “hey, you know, THIS WEEK he actually responded when we wouldn’t have bothered.”

They  just wrote up the plan. Since it was written, they didn’t want me to respond to anything; it was already committed to paper.

All because people think “hey, call me” and “let’s meet soon” with  vague message payloads is normal.

Total crap.

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