The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [94]
As I sat down to my blog, I couldn’t shake the Bridge Café guy’s skewed recognition that we all make mistakes. I titled my day’s entry: We All Make Mistakes. Now How Do You Deal? I played with the idea, but I felt fettered by the single day’s events. I couldn’t tell the whole story that way. Albany, Hanover, and Manchester felt like a family of experiences, much like the Three Bears (a simile that would win Jane’s approval). Papa Albany Bear had been too aggressive. Mama Hanover Bear had been gentle. And Baby, no, Teenage Manchester Bear had been juuuust … all over the place. Benjamin and I continued to debate motivations and explanations through the next day’s hunt, again in Manchester.
With the renown guy, I’d had no hope right from the start. He’d immediately changed the discussion from focusing on the typo to the question of who’s right. Once we’d devolved into “I’m right and you’re wrong,” his position had become entrenched because his very identity—as the person who is right—was at stake. “That’s a huge thing that I see in customer service. When customers feel like they’re being told they’re wrong, they get hostile,” Benjamin added.
The renown and gorganzola affairs had shared that confrontational defensiveness. “Why should I fix it? Because you say so?” “What school do you teach at?” They’d responded to my request by asking who I was to be correcting them. As much as I’d tried not to blame people for mistakes, focusing instead on the mistakes themselves, some people refused to let that distinction play. Anything they did became linked to their identity, and anyone who suggested the slightest tail-off-a-letter change to what they’d done became the enemy. I marveled at how, once again, tiny little typos had led me to a much larger communication issue, one that could apply across the broad spectrum of our daily experiences. Too often, we get stuck arguing from that perspective, placing egos like roadblocks into the situations. Perhaps I should have invested first in the appeasement of those egos, before even broaching the topic of the mistakes, with a sincere “How’s your day going?” In his book I’m Right, You’re Wrong, Now What? the clinical psychologist Dr. Xavier Amador sums up his approach to conflict resolution as, “Why would anyone want to listen to you if he felt you had not first listened to him?”
So what about the other reactions we encountered? For some, the ambivalent nature of apathy rears its fuzzy-logic head. We’d already witnessed how apathy could be boon or bane for us, but now I could field effectively alongside that most infamous of all shortstops, I-Don’t-Give-A-Darn.* The prerequisite for apathy was creating a boundary line between oneself and the rest of the world. Once that boundary was set, apathy could take root, either from basic frustration at forces outside one’s control or from a consciously predetermined refusal to allow the outside any concern. Our Noodler represented the latter, and as soon as he identified us as “not my problem,” he could shoot us down with practiced ease. We didn’t even have time to state our relevance; we were interlopers, and we stood outside the boundary. On the obverse of the apathy coin, my ceasar-salad correction had been allowed because the woman hadn’t cared about the words that would be wiped away. Telling us yes had been the fastest way to resolve