The war against rudeness

In the first scene of Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Clementis, a former Czechoslovakia communist leader's image was airbrushed out of a photograph by the government. He was charged with treason and made ‘invisible’.

And that’s exactly what people who don’t return telephone calls or reply to emails want. They want to make you invisible.

This story is about respect or a lack of it in business communication. To tell the story properly I need to eliminate some contexts where a person may rightly not wish to return a call or reply.

1. She/he has no romantic interest you

2. They are dead or on holiday

3. They have contracted a mental illness

You have an enquiry. You want to pass on some information. You are interested in getting a job. You have a bill to pay. That sort of thing.

And all you get is silence. Wait 48 hours, that’s what my old journalism lecturer used to say. If they don’t return your call, hunt them down (her words) and ask them what they have to hide. If they say ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t get your message,” then use that as a direct quote in the story.

What do they have to hide? That’s my first reaction. Sinister, isn’t it? Why do I think a person is concealing something from me when they fail to return my call or email after 48 hours when I know they are at work? Their silence is a one-finger salute raised behind my back.

It says, this guy has nothing to offer me. It says, I’m a very important person, she can wait. It says, I’ll put this customer on hold until next Monday as I have some serious Facebooking to do. I’ll get back to her when I get back from my holidays or maybe it says ‘oh no, he’s on to me!’ More likely it says, I don’t respect you or your communication, so disappear like Clementis.

Normally Ruth Ostrow‘s opinion articles from The Australian read like she has soaked too long in a Byron Bay spa but her piece ‘Uncommon Courtesy’ (6 August 2011) displayed wisdom beyond that of her spirit totems.

“You send another email, perhaps a text, or voicemail. And as time passes, so does your self-esteem. There’s nothing quite as diminishing as being ignored, or made to feel invisible,” says Ms Ostrow. Spot on.

Rudeness and disrespect is now so acceptable because electronic media allows us to avoid the avoidable. As messages pour in, sometimes hundreds a day for busy people, we bury them in our inboxes, where they stay ‘un-actioned’ to use a weasel word.

This calls in to question the ontology of emails. For some serial offenders we need to ask the question - are emails really real? They are so easy to delete. “I’m sorry, I never got your email.” In a world of disembodied communication, of Facebook and Twitter, it is so easy to forget that digital communiqués were written by people.

I have a fantasy that little Anne Frank is in the loft in Amsterdam. She has only has one email address and has been frantically emailing the customer service department of a major bank. Which bank? A major bank. She is desperate. “Quickly,” she writes, “the Germans will be here soon.” Unfortunately for Anne she sent her emails to the ‘Who Gives A Fat Rats Department’.

Some HR recruitment companies have gone one step further and added an automatic responder message when candidates apply for a job which reads, ‘if you don’t hear back from us in three weeks, you didn’t get the job.’

What sort of corporate ethos allows that sort of statement? Let me decode that for you: ‘you won’t hear back from us, it’s because we’re arrogant, lazy bastards who don’t give a fig … but please apply again to be insulted by us anew.’

I’m old enough to remember when people wrote a note in cursive with a pen on paper to thank a staff member for doing a good job. People used the telephone to thank the host for a convivial night at a dinner party. Now people don’t write with ink – and it appears they have trouble returning emails too. Rudeness rules.

I was taught as a child boarder at Prince Alfred College in Adelaide (about one million years ago), that you should not speak to just one person for the entire meal. Speak to the person at your left during entree and to the person at your right during the main meal. It seems crazy I know, but when I’m at a function where I don’t know a soul, that’s what I do.

Why do I remember this 30 years later? It’s because it was drilled in to me. That, and never play across the line in cricket.

Of course there is a place for silence. It is an oxymoron. The power of silence in relationships, business and politics works to achieve communication. We need to fill anticipatory silence with the sounds of our voices. Our voices are punctuated by silence. There is no place for unresponsiveness.

I am starting to sound like one of those old whining boomers on TV who bitch about the state of the world. Not so. I like the world and all in it. But if you try to treat me like Clementis, I’ll come calling in person.