"Could You Put That In A Memo And Entitle It 'Shit I Already Know'?"

Saint John Feast Day
Birthday - Louis Pasteur (chemist)
Birthday - Lee Salk (child psychologist)

 

So The Guy at our store—the one male sales associate—is a tall, cute, courteous hyperMormon. I like him in a passive way, but he’s got this habit that drives me nuts, and that is lecturing me every time I ask a question. He doesn’t moralize, I hasten to clarify. He will merely answers a question such as “How do I do Step 12 in this complicated new register procedure involving a gift card?” with a detailed description of, not Step 12, but Steps 1-22, 21 of which I already know how to do. When he can, he not only unleashes the whole procedure, but also will in fact gallantly step in and do it for me. Protests such as “Yeah, I know all that, I was just wondering if I could scan the gift card’s bar code, which you have confirmed” do not avail me.

 

Basically, we stand there sounding like a case study from a book by Deborah Tannen.

 

Our whole relationship, such as it is, is made up of the phenomenon* of miscommunication. People talk about anthropological oddities like Those People Who Have A Different Language For Men And Women as though it’s something unique, when the truth is that nobody is speaking the same language. Everyone has a different goal when they talk, and mine is often different from his.

 

Part of it is that no two people have the same sense of humor. Most of what I say is some joke, which is bad when The Guy has no a very different sense of humor. And on top of this, his enjoyment of lecturing pounces on one of my favorite kinds of jokes, which is to subtly deliberately misunderstand something obvious.** Instead of recognizing some bizarre comment as a little bit of surrealist absurdity, he thinks I genuinely am stupid, and feels that it is his duty to explain it to me.  And then I say, “Dude, I already knew that,” but of course he thinks I’m covering. It’s obnoxious.

 

At least he usually waits for me to make the daft comments.  I have a lot of uncles who don’t, and prefer to just start with a lecture about an innoucuous conversational comment, no matter how much they know or don’t know about it.  I don’t know if it’s because I’m a girl, and therefore obviously need this instruction from a knowledgeable man, or if they do it with other guys, too.  Either way, that also gets annoying.

 

I just hope the Dude doesn’t start up doing it any more than he already does.  A little is good, but I may have to kill him if he tries to go too far.

 

 

*Doo DOO doo-doo doo!

 

**No, I don’t mean like those damn motivational speakers who would come to your elementary school and ask if anyone could tell him how to make a peanut butter sandwich or something, and then when the kids said something like “Get the peanut butter” he’d look confused and pretend not to know how to open the jar, so you’d have to say “Open the jar” and he’d try to break it or something so you’d have to say “Unscrew the lid!”  I hated those guys. They probably were using this hilarious gag to teach us some moral, like that you have to use good communication skills or that you should always brush your teeth, but I always was infuriated by the deliberate misunderstanding, and the arbitrariness of when they decided that they now had atomized the instructions enough. It was years before I realized that the term I had been searching for whenever they started up their uproariously funny routine was “fucking dumbshit.”