Blogtrek

Communication

Communication has been a serious problem in human relations for centuries. I have seen at least two such incidents this week.There are many ways such incidents could occur:

A teacher in a computer class, wanting his students to click on a button to turn a service, such as IIS, on, tells the class to press a button. Some students complain they have no such button. He goes to help them and straightens their situation out. He then repeats his request to the class to click on the button. Students who have already clicked the button click it again, turning the service off. Then they complain when they get error messages when they do things supposing the service is on.

The Breakfast Toastmaster club meets at 7:30 am on Thursdays in a municipal building in a city. Another one, the Nightspeakers Toastmasters club, meets in the same building in the same room at 7:30 pm on Thursdays. Jan, interested in Toastmasters, calls a contact phone number and gets Kelly, who tells Jan there is a club meeting at 7:30 this Thursday and we would like to have you there. Jan meant the Breakfast club, but gets surprised when Kelly shows up at the Nightspeakers club instead.

What happened to me this week is that I signed up for a class, and I was told two months ago that I was enrolled in it. I heard nothing more on it, and then when I showed up for it, I was NOT signed up. Apparently they had fewer slots than expected, and they dropped me from it. Not hearing this, I showed up anyway, and was able to take it anyway when someone else did not show up.

Using 24-hour time would have resolved the Toastmaster problem. That's why the military adopted it, when a miscommunication could mean the difference between life and death. The problem, however, is a tradeoff between telling everything that you can aboiut a situation, using up a lot of time; perhaps some of the message does not get through because there is so many things to remember, and not telling every detail about it, in which case a problem caused by that detail turns up. It is a tough problem to solve, and I believe that communication seems to work best when as people hold as many default assumptions in common as possible.