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Interpersonal Interactions
Mar. 23rd, 2006 08:05 amCompare and contrast:
(1) Needed to call lawyer a couple of times last week and this week. Horrible source of stress! Don't know what to ask, don't know what answers to expect, unspecified fear of phone. All bad. Did actually succeed in doing it but with a lot of warmup.
(2) Went to IBM HR thing all day Tuesday, which involved a fair amount of talking to HR people and other employees that I've never met before. This was fine; I got a reasonable amount of advice, I got some useful consistent answers to the "what do I need to do to advance my career in the next couple of years" question, I exchanged "elevator speeches" and life stories with a couple of people in one of the afternoon sessions.
What makes these different? One factor might be that I can procrastinate at the telephone the way I can't in person. (I delay "important" email too, but I can eventually just sit down and crank it out without too much pain; it's also much less interactive.) A second is that my relationship with the lawyer, whom I'll have to deal with probably a couple more times in the next month or two, is longer than my relationships with the other IBM people, whom I'll probably never see again. And I'm much more familiar with the general mode of social interaction with meeting people in a professional environment, where I do kind of half expect the lawyer to tell me "you're on crack, this needs to completely get redone and it'll take weeks of your time and cost thousands of dollars".
How do people who live their lives on the phone deal? I'd think that, say, any kind of sales position I'd be really terrible at.
(1) Needed to call lawyer a couple of times last week and this week. Horrible source of stress! Don't know what to ask, don't know what answers to expect, unspecified fear of phone. All bad. Did actually succeed in doing it but with a lot of warmup.
(2) Went to IBM HR thing all day Tuesday, which involved a fair amount of talking to HR people and other employees that I've never met before. This was fine; I got a reasonable amount of advice, I got some useful consistent answers to the "what do I need to do to advance my career in the next couple of years" question, I exchanged "elevator speeches" and life stories with a couple of people in one of the afternoon sessions.
What makes these different? One factor might be that I can procrastinate at the telephone the way I can't in person. (I delay "important" email too, but I can eventually just sit down and crank it out without too much pain; it's also much less interactive.) A second is that my relationship with the lawyer, whom I'll have to deal with probably a couple more times in the next month or two, is longer than my relationships with the other IBM people, whom I'll probably never see again. And I'm much more familiar with the general mode of social interaction with meeting people in a professional environment, where I do kind of half expect the lawyer to tell me "you're on crack, this needs to completely get redone and it'll take weeks of your time and cost thousands of dollars".
How do people who live their lives on the phone deal? I'd think that, say, any kind of sales position I'd be really terrible at.
