Text 344, 97 rader
Skriven 2006-06-04 16:42:40 av Ardith Hinton (1:153/716.0)
    Kommentar till text 330 av James Bradley (1:134/77.0)
Ärende: Second Thoughts...  3.
==============================
Hi again, James!  This is a continuation of my previous message to you:

JB>  An old neighbor was a auto-body mechanic, and told me
JB>  about some of the characters he used to work with, and
JB>  what they'd do to their difficult customers' cars.


          The same goes on in the restaurant business too.  Although I've never
worked with people like that, Dallas & I saw a TV show about it.  And I noticed
that when I wanted a school secretary to do something for me they would have it
ready almost immediately while more urgent stuff was put on hold.  Maybe it was
because of the way I interacted with them.  I'd worked in an office one summer,
thinking it might make a nice change from coming home smelling of fish & chips,
but for the most part I found it very lonely & boring... so I was always polite
& respectful to the school secretaries, and I gave them lots of lead time.  For
some reason the folks who were demanding & impatient had to wait a bit....  ;-)



JB>  I guess after being on the other side of the bench,
JB>  I can better understand their 'incomplete' processes.


          I see how some jobs could be stultifying after awhile.  When a person
gets to such a point it may be time to change jobs, as your friend did....  :-)



JB>  You, had a pretty good handle on the first stages of
JB>  troubleshooting, but that is *very* much an exception.


          Thanks!  As an NT (representing 12% of the population) I'm a trouble-
shooter by nature.  Thus I enjoyed learning assistance, in which I could figure
out how a child's mind worked & find ways to get through to him or her when the
standard methods had failed.  Sometimes the SJ teachers drove me crazy, though.
SJ's like drill & repetition, they like to be told what to do, and they tend to
assume everybody else feels the same way... so if they found drill unsuccessful
they thought the solution was more drill (which they expected me to carry out).
IMHO that's a waste of my talents.  An aide could have done the same... (sigh).



JB>  Usually, a customer just says it stops, or it doesn't
JB>  work, and then they play stupid.


          Well... there may be various reasons for that.  Many people go into a
panic when their computer doesn't work, so they're unable to think clearly even
though they're bright enough in other ways.  Some may have had a bad experience
with a techie who didn't want to know what they were doing on the computer just
before it locked up, for example, or who retorted "That can't happen!" and made
no attempt to help.  And if women "play stupid", in the sense that they pretend
to be less bright & capable than they really are, I can understand that too.  I
did the same on occasion in my younger days when gas station attendants offered
to check my oil in hope of making another sale.  I found the easiest way to get
the persistent ones off my back was to say, with an air of wide-eyed innocence,
"My husband looks after that."  They'd probably feel threatened if I admitted I
often did it myself, but they wouldn't intrude on another man's territory.  ;-)



JB>  I guess that's why I pointed out a perpetual perception
JB>  addict, that they are more wishy-washy than decisive.


          I have some difficulty with the word "wishy-washy" because my mother-
in-law... who was very SJ... described me the same way.  However, I believe I'm
starting to understand more about what makes "perception addicts" tick.  Awhile
ago Dallas & I were shopping in a department store, for example, where we found
a cashier behind a sign indicating the till was closed.  When we enquired as to
the cashier's intentions she replied (with some irritation) "It's only a sign!"
Now that we've been talking about what goes on in the minds of various SP's the
penny has dropped.  The cashier may not have to work very hard if her customers
think she's unavailable... I saw that immediately.  There may be another reason
for her behaviour too, though.  SJ's thrive on rules, policies, and procedures.
They love posting signs with rules like "No pickup or dropoff of students here"
or "Staff Only -- no exceptions!"  But when others put these rules to the test,
they may find the signs don't quite mean what they say.  So if an SP thinks the
sign saying "DANGER -- KEEP OUT!" is irrelevant, I can understand that....  :-)



JB>  Again, the first step in troubleshooting, is to repeat
JB>  the trouble.


          Exactly.  Dallas has the same problem sometimes with a computer which
runs perfectly on the bench but not in the customer's home.  When a variable is
introduced the results may be different.  The textbooks don't mention people in
the real world, for example, with timed outlets they didn't know about....  :-)




--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+
 * Origin: Wits' End, Vancouver CANADA (1:153/716)