Class, today we are going to talk about interpersonal communication. We will be addressing the subject of the
Conversational Dismount, and the difficulties some people suffer in managing it.
Conversational Dismount is a term I have coined (or appropriated to my own uses, I'm not sure anymore) to describe the manner in which a conversation ends. Though we are living in the days of text-messaging,
Leetspeak, and multitasking, personal verbal interaction still retains a modicum of formality that lends structure and serves as a template for how correspondence should be conducted. Conversations, in general, have a beginning, middle, and an end, all of which bear some trivial protocol that is (or should be) nearly universally understood. Most conversations start with a greeting or a question, continue on for an unspecified (but finite) amount of time, and then end with a closing salutation or other situationally appropriate language that delineates the conclusion. This structure allows conversations to be discrete entities with a fixed beginning and end, a format we humans find pleasing.
And why, you ask, are we even discussing something that should be obvious to anyone with even rudimentary vocal skills? Because when this structure is forfeited, the world as we know it plunges into chaos. Mock me if you will, but I have firsthand experience of the ruin it can bring.
The Vanishing ActI once knew an individual who wantonly disregarded the time-honored format of the standard English conversation. This person treated interaction as if it were a spontaneous and nebulous activity which could literally start and finish at any moment. When speaking with them, they would frequently start talking in a stream-of-consciousness manner, the first thing out of their mouth being whatever it was that found itself bouncing around their mind at that exact moment. This habit also meant that they frequently interrupted ongoing conversations without any regard to etiquette, though that phenomenon is somewhat off topic. Just as a conversation could start randomly at any moment, so too could one end just as abruptly. Without warning or premeditation, this person would simply walk away, sometimes with my words still being spoken or hanging in the air. I kid you not, on more than one occasion I was speaking with them, looked away, and looked back to find them gone. Our conversational dismount, as it were, was abrupt and practically non-existent. They were the conversation equivalent of a ninja (or to use a modern parallel, the American Delta Forces). Batman is a famous employer of this "technique".
The Night of A Thousand GoodbyesAt the other end of the spectrum is a situation similar to the
Salutation Loop Phenomenon (or rather a specific application thereof). In phone calls with my father I routinely find that, at the end of the call, we cannot negotiate an appropriate conversational dismount. He is a polite man who raised me to be polite as well, but as such we routinely find ourselves in a game of etiquette chicken, stuck in a salutation loop at the end of a call. In the case of the individual above the problem involved having no closure whatsoever. In this case, it's an indefinite closer, a dismount that never actually dismounts. Here is a theoretical transcript:
Kato, the lesser: Alright, Dad, I gotta go.
Kato, the greater: Okay, we'll be talkin' to ya.
Kato, the lesser: Sounds good. You take care.
Kato, the greater: You too. I'll see you, I guess, when I see ya.
Kato, the lesser: Yup, have a good evening.
Kato, the greater: You too. Have a good week, don't work to hard.
Kato, the lesser: I'll try not to, tell Mom I love her.
Kato, the greater: I will, stay outta trouble.
Kato, the lesser: I'll see what I can do. Have a good one.
Kato, the greater: Yup, stay warm.
Kato, the lesser: You too. Alright, goodnight, Dad.
Kato, the greater: Okay, we'll be talkin' to ya...
This can go on for twenty minutes before I eventually decide to break the cycle and simply hang up the phone, forcing myself to consciously stifle the instinct to reply with one last pleasantry. I have attempted to point out the fact that we clearly suffer some type of dismount dysfunction but apparently my father is in too deep and doesn't even realize what is happening. I fear that with each call we come closer and closer to the point of no return, a cycle that cannot be broken, a recursive salutation loop the likes of which no man has ever seen. My only salvation lies in Cingular, who is guaranteed to drop the call at some point without fail. I only hope it isn't too late.
Parents, teach your children about the
Conversational Dismount, before someone
Driving to work a few weeks ago a new sign caught my eye. Seeing as how I drive the same way every day, changes in the landscape tend to attract my attention, although I'll freely admit that I'm on autopilot most of the way. The sign I passed read the following:
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I stumbled across another odd comic the other day entitled "Perry Bible Fellowship". I found it strangely amusing, but then I would. Check out the archive. Note that some of them are not quite work-safe.
Kato's Brain: Wait a minute, what was that?
The new Honda Element commercials with the crab talking to the car crack me up. I don't know what it is, exactly; there is something inexplicably funny to me about talking crabs, particularly when they are fixated on pinching.
Would it surprise you to hear that I have had a tune stuck in my head for about two weeks now? It's not like that happens often. This time it is DarkMateris's The Picard Song.
I... I don't know what to say. My brain doesn't know how to handle this. I literally can't conjure the cognitive faculties to process this information. If you could see my face, you'd no doubt see my brow furrowed in a vain attempt to comprehend the situation. I'd say I'm speechless, but ask anyone who knows me, I've never been speechless a day in my life.
One of the big trends on the InterWeb in the past year has been the rise of the podcast. For those of you who don't consume new technology as if it were life-giving manna like myself, a podcast is a web feed of audio or video files placed on the Internet for anyone to download or subscribe [WikiPedia]. I listen to a couple right now, including This Week in Tech ("Revenge of the Screensavers") and Inside the Net with Amber MacArthur.
Let's face it, there's really only one thing the Internet does well: deliver porn. Sure you can send e-mails, play games, read news, blah blah blah, but porn, that's what's really driving this technological juggernaut. But, unfortunately, businesses and schools seem to frown upon their employees/students surfing for pornographic material on their time. It's such a shame, because sometimes you really just need to indulge that Half-Naked Women Baking Double Fudge Brownies fetish of yours. Well, some enterpreneuring webians have put their photoshopping skills to work in order to deliver us Work Safe Pr0n.
You know you've developed a reputation when you get in early for a change and your boss pokes their head inside your office, looks at the clock, and then looks at you, saying, "What the hell is wrong with you?"
