Inadvertently listening to a conversation

I was listening to a loud conversation the other day. I hesitate to say that it was in a café because a number of people have commented recently that rather nice cafés seem to be where I spend most of my time, and have asked if I ever actually write.

When you’re a sociable sort of bloke who enjoys the buzz of a busy inner city java-joint, writing for endless hours alone often calls for a contrasting environment to refresh and revitalise the brain. An hour’s break to contemplate humanity, or interact socially, soon fires up the neurons for another session at the keyboard. It’s simply a matter of balance.

But let’s get back to that conversation. A rather smartly dressed young man was complaining to his comrades that he’d spent hours crafting an email to a web development company, explaining to them exactly why he was unhappy with their service.

Choose your words carefully

“I wanted them to get the message in one email, so I chose my words carefully,” he said. “I covered every aspect of the problem in detail, and I even had my girlfriend read it so that I got it right. And then I get an email back from them full of advice and proposals, but none of it had anything to do with my issue. It’s as if they never even read the email I sent!”

That certainly struck a chord with me. In fact, much the same happened with one of my emails a couple of years ago. Fortunately I knew the addressee rather well, and was able to sit down and have a heart-to-heart to find out what went wrong.

“It’s too much,” he told me. “Every day I get emails that I don’t have time to read, never mind fully absorb. I end up just scanning through them to get the gist and hope I get it right.”

“And if you don’t …?”

He shrugged miserably. I lose customers, get stressed, and end up speed reading even faster because I feel panicked.”

That’s an extreme example of a very common phenomenon. We simply don’t make the time to read properly. Add the fact that the material we’re reading is often poorly written and it’s no wonder we’re confused and end up wasting more time unravelling meaning and getting even more stressed.

Excuse me, sire, did you actually read it?

Combine bad writing with hasty reading and things can get nasty. There’s an urban myth about a letter sent to an emissary in a volatile nation that was read as a direct insult. The unintended affront was caused by the smeared remains of a tiny insect on the paper creating a phantom comma in the wrong place in the opening sentence. If the letter’s recipient had read the entire missive properly he would have understood the error, instead of commencing retaliatory hostilities and dispensing with a few lives.

Ghost writing is often about disentangling a few obscure ideas mixed with random thoughts, and that’s one of the great challenges of the job. However, if I’m in doubt, it saves a lot of everyone’s time if I just ask the client what they mean, instead of making assumptions. Well, we wouldn’t want to start a war, would we?

Gail Jones - Dreams of Speaking

In her novel Dreams of Speaking (2005 Age Book of the Year Award), Gail Jones introduces us to Mr Sakamoto, a Japanese survivor of Hiroshima. Intelligent and urbane, he’s also an expert on Alexander Graham Bell, the pioneering engineer credited with inventing the telephone.

Mr Sakamoto’s fascination with Bell began with his own personal experiences of the phone and, from the narrative, it’s clear that the deeply personal interactions that Sakamoto enjoyed over the wires actually kept him sane during some of the darker moments of his life.

Without giving away what is a wonderful story, Ms Jones engages the reader with aspects of that priceless medium of human contact, the voice. But, in this case, it’s not the voice heard face-to-face that fascinates. It’s the voice on the other end of the phone. When whispered, murmured, and sighed, Mr Sakamoto suggests that words on the phone take on subtle nuances and inflections of shared confidentialities that wouldn’t occur face-to-face.

There's meaning in the voice

Today, satellites and fibre optics are replacing copper cable, and mobiles and VoIP are replacing the traditional dial phone. What remains, however, is the physical separation of conversationalists, a void waiting to be filled by the vibrating elements of speech and the rich and personal timbres of the voice.

I find face-to-face and phone discussions each have their own merits. But the phone does dispense with many of the constraints we must observe in a physical encounter, particularly between strangers. There is no body language to distract from the way something is said, no background noises to blur or conceal a nuance, no social behaviours or appearances to misjudge, and every reason to deeply engage one’s senses in an effort to fully comprehend the message in the voice.

Sometimes my work involves encouraging a client to think through an experience, to relive it, and ride a few bumps in the process. In those extremely sensitive moments, the phone is a tangible thing to hang onto. And not so much as a grip of abject terror, but more of a support as the emotions flow and ebb with the memories.

You can hear the client's thought processes

On the phone, comfortable, respectful, or reflective silences become part of a deeper conversation. One can almost hear the client’s thought processes, and it feels perfectly natural and unobtrusive to respond with ah, or hmm, just to let them know I’m there. Even the hum from the ether seems perfectly in tune with the moment.