The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [95]
Something must be done. Luckily, it need not be much. With a little effort, you can tame the attention eaters and draw conversation into the center of your life.
➺ Rule one: Say hello
And good-bye, to everyone you have dealings with. In shops, queues, on buses, customer helplines . . .
➺ Rule two: Ration your attention
I applaud the sign at my liquor store:
Customers talking into mobile phones will not be served: it is rude!
Ignore the phone, better still turn it off. The voice mail is there to be used.
Train people not to expect instant feedback. Only deal with emails and so on at a set time, and don’t answer colleagues outside paid hours except in emergencies; even if they work abroad, they should respect your time zone. Otherwise your day will become 24/7, and you’ll be so fried that soon everything will be an emergency—giving employers a more worth less.
➺ Rule three: Think before text
According to a survey in 2008, seven out of ten Britons text or email when a face-to-face conversation is possible, believing this saves time. But does it? The average employee spends one-and-a-half to two hours a day panhandling streams of verbiage, and a friend in industry is tormented by confusions that stem from trigger-fingered coworkers’ harebrained emails. Even email etiquette gurus Will Schwalbe and David Shipley are susceptible:
By the time we had sorted out our timetable, three weeks had passed, lots of emails had been exchanged, and a question that should have taken one minute to answer had eaten up hours. We had come face to face with one of email’s stealthiest characteristics: its ability to simulate forward motion. As Bob Geldof, the humanitarian rock musician, said, email is dangerous because it gives us “a feeling of action”—even when nothing is happening.
Before tapping the keys, ask: Is this the best way? Why agonize over an annoying email if you can see your colleague?
Just for a week, use email and text solely to send documents or schedule phone or face-to-face chat. How much time do you free up?
➺ Rule four: Appreciate the voice
Computers screen a great deal, as a Ready4Life etiquette course teacher told students:
You’re losing so many of your social tools on email. We can’t see the other person. Are they smiling? Are they angry? We just can’t see it.
Text is weak at expressing tone, the emotional dimension that gives words much of their meaning. For this reason, the expressive typography popular in the last communication revolution, the eighteenth century—a Ballyhoo of Capital Letters, Zany—Punctuation, and emphatic italics—is reborn in dastardly emoticons. :-(
But as Pebbles, seventeen, a Ready4Life student pointed out:
Everyone perceives them differently—like that sarcastic eye-rolling one.
Similarly, columnist Sophia Money-Coutts endured paroxysms over text message politesse: She asked me whether I signed off with a big kiss (X) or a little one (x). “Is there a distinction?” I asked, aghast that I might have committed romantic hari-kiri by sending big ones. “I’m not sure,” she replied, “but isn’t it all just so unclear?”
Indeed. There is the phone, in your hand. So, as David Gest would say, talk.
➺ Rule five: Question your definition of problems
Things once central and convenient—family dinners were cheaper, playing with kids kept them quiet—have come to be seen as optional, or obnoxious. Far from pleasure, play is a problem to Scott Huskinson, vendor of Tadpole (rubber cases that turn iPods into toys):
I thought how parents all over the world use in-car DVD players, but there’s no solution for entertaining kids once