Honour Your Inner Magpie

A Rant
OK, I have about had it up to here with this business of some people proclaiming loudly how the use of indirect communication is manipulative and sneaky and icky and game-playing and dishonest and evil and exerting power-over, (all words taken from actual comments) and that sort of thing. Even if you're ostensibly "owning your own reactions" by saying, "It seems to me that it's this way," it feels to me like you're palming a card here, especially when you go on to congratulate yourselves for avoiding the people who practice any sort of indirect communication*.

If you really do want to avoid people who practice any sort of indirect communication, let me help you. The door's that way. Thanks for coming.

No. You want direct communication? Shut up and read this stuff, and think about it. And then re-read it, and think about it again. And then firmly remind yourself that there are reasons why I do this stuff, and why lots of people in my regional/ethnic group -- and in a lot of other groups, some of them entirely other and entirely elsewhere! -- do this stuff. And it's NOT WRONG. Just because it's not the way you do it, and just because you think it would be so much more efficient (for whom, hmmmm?) if everybody else did it (so it would be easy for you, hmm?) does not mean that different is bad.

Sheesh, people.

Look, when you go around proclaiming that your way is always direct and always clear, and other people's ways are indirect and sneaky and manipulative and uncomfortable and unfamiliar and icky, what you are really telling me is "I ADMIT I AM A BAD COMMUNICATIONS ENGINEER. I AM FRUSTRATED HERE AND AM THEREFORE JUST GOING TO DECLARE THAT THE LAWS OF CONVERSATIONAL PHYSICS ARE ALL WRONG."

Good luck with that strategy.

Or, worse, you're going to declare that my motives are evil. Seriously. What do you think you've been saying? If you stick to "It seems to me this way," without taking the next step and learning how to engineer around the problem, you leave it to me to do so. And why should I want to do all the work, for the privilege of having a conversation with someone who has told me that they despise and distrust my cultural background, my motives, and my integrity in interacting with them?

If choosing your communication style is so easy, then for the purposes of the rest of this discussion, how about you use mine? And get it right, dammit. If it's so easy and all. After all, you expect me to switch to yours. (And what's more, I sometimes do. Almost everybody who does indirect communication also does direct communication at least part of the time. Is the converse true? Is it true for you personally?)

Meanwhile, I give you this food for thought: I have heard and understood what you say about indirect communication (which covers a lot of turf, but for now I will take it as what you mean when you point to something and say "indirect communication"). You don't like it and you don't trust it and you're not good at it. OK. Do you understand that when I try to explain it to you, or when Mrissa does, or various other folks who are from people who know how to do this sort of communication, we are NOT trying to force you to do it? We're trying to hand you the glossary and the secret decoder ring and the field guides to our particular flavor of indirect communication, because we're paying you the compliment of thinking that you could be a good enough communication techie to be glad to have some of the documentation and cool hacks shared with you.

A guy wouldn't mind if a person would communicate some willingness to work together in good faith. If that's what a person wants, I mean. Seriously, I hope it is. Geeking communication is much more fun if nobody's throwing the Allen wrench I offer them back at me.

I leave it to the Scandosotans to translate the first two sentences of that last paragraph, or anybody else that wants to. Me, I am going to go hang out with Juan, and eat the nice muffin he brought home for me, and watch Bones, which is one of our favorite shows to geek communication styles while watching. I'll be back. Try not to break the place while I'm gone, or each other. See you in a while. There's pop and beer in the fridge, and cookies in the jar; help yourselves.

* What would I respect more? Hearing you say, "I'm not good at indirect communication. It frustrates and confuses me, and the mismatch has on occasion cost me a bunch, and cost the people I care about. " Even more than that, I respect the people who try to figure out how to use the technology of communication to achieve understanding and mutual willingness-to-interact-in-the-future. (And if you've read everything here and then go on to conclude that I have just asked you to "make nice," I am going to throw back my head and howl.)