September 21, 2004

Filters

The filters through which we all perceive the world are amazing things.

Two or more persons can look at the very same situation or issue with the same amount of information about it and come away with two completely different views of what happened.

Sometimes I wonder how we communicate at all. Women and men, Democrats and Republicans, faithful and humanists, we all have obvious generalized filters that skew our recollection of events differently than the opposite camp. But there are many shades of gray, too.

Today a very strong willed colleague of mine took filters to a new level.

To set the stage, understand that we are nearly polar opposites, with communication habits that slam against the outer limits of both the Myers-Briggs scale and the caricatures our respective genders paint of the other.

She’s a guy’s nightmare: an overly loquacious female who insists on saying the same thing five times in excruciating detail to ensure I understand every nuance of her position and the varied logical, historical, and spiritual reasons she arrived there.

I’m a gal’s nightmare: a virtual Saturday Night Live sketch of the non-communicating male, someone who considers it a data mining expedition if I need to listen to more than one sentence in a row and for whom “Yes,” “No,” and “I don’t know” are perfectly acceptable (and desired) responses to almost any query.

In a draining 90-minute meeting this morning, we discussed a task our client wanted us to accomplish. It went something like this:

Her: Ten minutes on why we should change our client’s mind and do it a different way.

Me: One minute on how our client was very specific about his request and that it would be easy to tailor a similar existing project to meet his needs.

Her: A ten-minute restatement of her position, followed by the truism that sometimes we need to guide our client to a better idea.

Me: OK, but let's give him what he asked for (a one-day job) as a start and then present ideas for enhancing the process.

Her: A ten-minute restatement of her position.

Me: Several Al Gore-like sighs.

Third party: Why don’t we offer him a choice? We can present him the options of having: a) Exactly what he asked for, or b) This modified scenario.

Me: That’s OK, but we need to present those options as our department’s recommendation. We need to go to him with one solution, even if it’s a menu of both options. We don’t want to provide him one or the other option, and then have competing voices from within our group politicking him to select a different option.

Her: "No, we DO want to provide him two options," followed by a ten-minute restatement of her position.

Me: Leg tapping incessantly as I endure the same movie yet again. Finally, “No, what I meant was that, OK, we DO provide two options, but that we present them as our overall departmental recommendation so that we are speaking with one voice.”

Her: “No, what you meant was…”

Cue the record needle ripping across the surface of the LP. OK, right there we crossed a line.

We all have our filters, but this filter is MINE. I’m sorry, but unless John Ashcroft has his way over the next few years, what I am thinking and what I mean to say when I say it get to remain all mine.

At least for now, your filter is not allowed to extend into my head...

September 10, 2004

I think I have Auschwitz Syndrome

I couldn’t help but overhearing the 23 year-old telling a story to another co-worker in the copy room this morning. She was know-it-all-ing-ly explaining “Auschwitz Syndrome.” Me being me, and it being Friday, I had to jump in.

“Auschwitz Syndrome? That sounds terrible.”

“Yeah, it is. You know what it is?”

“You have the urge to shove someone in the oven?”

She looked at me like I had three heads, and had said the most offensive thing in the entire world. Which was kind of my intention.

“Um, no. It’s this awful psychological condition where a parent will intentionally keep a child sick because they get attention and the child continues to need them. Yeah, I always loved psychology classes. They were my best classes in school.”

“That’s so funny. I always thought that was called Munchausen Syndrome. I’ve totally been calling it that all these years! But I only took one introductory psychology class in college.”