The Household COO

June 24, 2005

I say something, you hear it differently. You say something, I hear something else. It’s amazing that it happens all the time but somehow it seems to be getting worse - at least, in my experience…

For example, I attend a meeting with my boss, she tells me what she wants me to do, I go and do it, return to her and find out that I’ve misheard her. I’m positive she said go with plan A and she’s convinced we had agreed to go with plan B. I started jotting down minutes for every discussion after that and sent it to her as a post discussion follow up. It made things a little better.

This reminds me of a cartoon I received from a friend where the cartoonist drew several swings and labelled each drawing with: “What the client wanted”, “What the sales person heard”, “What the technician designed”, “what the client really needed”. I know I’ve missed out a few steps along the way, but I thought it was a great depiction of “chinese whispers” in action at the work place.

So work miscommunication is just one example. Wedding planning discussions are another area of massive contention. Personally, I think we should have minutes for these discussions too.

What my dad said he said: “We’re simple people, we don’t need anything fancy, but whatever traditions you feel you need to adhere to, please do so.”

What the other side heard: “Go with the full works. Adhere to every custom in the wedding book.”

This is just one example of many, but it made me wonder how two people can live together when no one understands anyone? We postponed our wedding because we couldn’t agree on anything. Heck, we even called off the relationship at one stage!

Since then, I’ve talked to many friends about how they went about planning their wedding and guess what I found out? For anyone thinking about getting married, arguments and breakups are usually part of the process. So far, I haven’t spoken to any couples where it was smooth sailing all the way. Lots of my friends have successfully managed to get hitched and most of them have been ready to call it off at some stage or other during the planning of the wedding. Life after the wedding appears to be fairly cruisy for most of them.

If only we could just elope…

This entry was posted on Friday, February 3rd, 2006 at 3:44 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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