From Joe.My.God
I love Larry King’s apparently genuine confusion over gay people who would promote anti-gay stuff. Bless his heart. He’s like a baby porcupine playing with a new balloon.
PS For those who don’t understand the significance, Ken Mehlman came out of the closet today.
Update: I forgot to link over to Joe. It should also be noted: this clip is from 2006.
This morning I tweeted.
A few minutes later, I got an email on Facebook from a handsome real estate broker who was trying to be helpful. Here’s that email exchange.
HIM
I heard that you might be moving to Nashville and I would love to help
you find a place to live.If nothing else, feel free to use my website to help out with the home
search if you need it at [REDACTED].Let me know if I can help.
ME
Thanks for reminding me to update my privacy settings.
That wasn’t creepy at all.
HIM
haha. sorry it freaked you out.
I heard this on twitter. Whatever you put on twitter, people will respond.
ME
Yeah. Respond on Twitter…
I had opened my Facebook privacy settings a little while back to show an acquaintance something and forgot to change it back. This just reminded me.
By the way, I’ve arranged for a place to live already. Thanks for your offer there.
Now, I am perfectly aware that I am all up on the internets and it is not difficult to find me. But it strikes me as more than a little off-putting to have a perfect stranger comment on something I put on one social network (It didn’t show up on Facebook because the Twitter app there is messing up again.) in a completely different forum.
That would be like saying to your friend, “You know, I could really go for some pizza right now.” And then you get a text message from the local pizza shop about their special offers. Creepy.
So, I changed my privacy settings on Facebook back to the more stringent ones and came away with this important lesson:
How to creep out potential customers with social media marketing in one easy step
Point out the fact that on the internets nothing is really private and everything is connected and then talk about how you intend to exploit it for your personal gain.
As a rule, folks, when using social media marketing, engage prospects only in the forum in which they’ve engaged you or attracted your attention.
PS. I ended up friending him on Facebook because his services might be useful later on.
UPDATE: Yeah, I know I’m encouraging bad behavior by friending him after he did this weird thing. But I happened to go look at his resume while writing up this and I think he might be a useful contact later on.
UPDATE 2: Reader Qwertz posted an interesting comment about a parallel principle in law:
The mirror image rule is a rule in contract law that says that the acceptance must be made in the same form in which the offer was made in order to be valid. The reasons for it are exactly the same – so the offeror knows where to look for the acceptance, and so there are no misunderstandings that might lead to awkwardness. Imagine you have old furniture for sale on Craigslist, and then some stranger DMs you on Twitter to say he’ll buy it. Creepy, unexpected, and not a valid acceptance of your Craigslist offer.
Tough question. So much is determined by context here, so I can’t tell you one sure-fire way to deal with these situations.
I once had a customer call one of my employees, leave a voicemail in which he cursed up a blue streak over some relatively minor issue. I directed my employee not to return his call and contacted his account manager. I explained the situation to the account manager and related his behavior and explained that we would not be in contact with that particular individual until we had received assurances that all would observe professional conduct. That fellow called back later, apologized, and explained his situation, which was very stressful and we happily made him out to be a hero in the end.
The option of delivering such ultimatums is very rare. most frequently unprofessional behavior is difficult to quantify, undocumented, and has to be dealt with in such a way as to maintain and improve the relationship with the offender.
While I haven’t spent a lot of time considering these situations in my short career, I do have a couple of recommendations.
1) Just listen
A lot of times when someone is on a tear about something that makes them unhappy, the best thing you can do is just listen. Let them go on and on as they see fit. If a comment is demanded of you, use “reflective listening techniques” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflective_listening) to show that you understand where they’re coming from. (Word of caution: be subtle about this. If you are too obvious about it, you can inspire a level of rage you’ve perhaps never known before.) and commiserate with the speaker.
Interestingly, women are better at this than men. Women have a strong tendency to relate to the person with whom their speaking, while men have a tendency to focus on offering up solutions. If you — man or woman — find yourself tempted to offer up a solution, please stop and think carefully. Offering a solution where the speaker is looking for commiseration can be a fatal misstep. Ask your girlfriend.
2) The Meta-Conversation
In some contexts, you can separate the issue from the conversation. You can say, “You know, I really didn’t like how you came to me with this situation. You were angry and you cursed at me. I felt that was unprofessional and it distracted me from finding solutions from you.”
This is a VERY tricky approach. I saw one of my employees impressively employ this approach on a client once recently. I’m still not sure how she pulled it off, but it was a stroke of genius. Somehow, she managed to change the conversation from “this situation” to “this broad-overarching-issue-and-how-we-deal-with-it-together.”
I can’t really tell you how she did it because it was so entrenched with the relationship with the customer and the situation, but it was most very subtle and MOST excellent. Seriously, it was amazing.
Basically, she managed to get the client to stop and think about what the general problem was. It clearly wasn’t this particular situation, but a set of situations with a common theme. She got the client to think about the question, “What was the common theme?”
3) What’s your goal?
I understand that I am sometimes more aggressive than some people prefer. I would just rather than people get things out in the air, address it, and then move on. This disposition has not been helped by my time in NYC where yelling at people and forgetting about it is de rigueur.
I advise my employees to keep in mind their goal with a particular conversation. This goes for professional as well as personal conversations.
Sometimes it’s legitimate to have as your goal a simple airing of grievances. But sometimes your goal is to get your audience to agree with you. Sometimes you just want them to agree with a fee or an objective.
I once said to a customer, “You know, we’re never going to agree on this. You have a particular view of events that I understand and can sympathize with, but I have another view which is supported my documentation which you approved. And even if you don’t think that documentation is right, I can’t possibly go back to my team and tell them how they were wrong because everything I see says they were right. We should look to the future. How can we fix this and how can we avoid it for the future.”
Depending on your goal, you have to modify your approach. If your goal is to get them to sign a work order or agree to a new price for a project, it’s probably not a good plan to argue with them and present all the reasons you think they suck.
It’s tough to let it go when someone else is unprofessional because it so often seems like a matter of justice. When you’re working with internal stakeholders your opportunities are greater than they are with clients. But in any case you have to select the right time and place to confront that behavior.
I find that instead of addressing a specific incident, it is better to wait a moment until that situation as passed and then present some guiding principles. “These are the things we like!” “These are the things we really do NOT like.” “This is what we think you like!” “This is what we think you do NOT like.” In general, if someone can participate in outlining those policies practices, they will be more inclined to endorse them going forward.
So, those are three tips that I would offer, in general, for dealing with difficult people at work. I do think you have to carefully study each situation, though. There just isn’t a tactic that will work in all cases.
But I will tell you this: The good clients make it completely worth it. I have one client in particular who is honest, just, and frank. He regards justice and honesty as virtues and even when his position isn’t completely rational, he is usually willing to accept a well presented argument to the contrary and consider it in context. It makes dealing with him not only tolerable but one of the great highlights of my day.
So, work at it and see if you can coax the virtue out of a business partner. It’s well worth it.
PS. Don’t forget to work on your own virtues. It’s possible YOU’RE the crazy one in a difficult conversation!
Things have been wicked busy for me lately. I’ve got this new fella thing going on and my job has presented me with a huge new opportunity that requires that I move nearly 900 miles away. Never mind the fact that my job even as it stands today has been superbizzy of late. Everything is just piling up like crazy!
So, what’s happened so far?
Well, this past week, I was fortunate to be able to spend a little time in Nashville. I saw some of the city and I looked at several apartment complexes. I am very happy to say that I found a very nice apartment complex in a good neighborhood, close to work, and well within my price range. It has two bedrooms and two bathrooms. If I should be possessed by the devil and decide I want to start doing my own laundry, there are washer and dryer hook ups. The kitchen is really nice and even has a dishwasher and a garbage disposal and lots and lots of counter space. The closets are HUGE. (I’m pretty sure if the closets had windows they would try to call them studio apartments here in NYC.)
I’m pretty stoked about it.
Also, whilst in Nashville, the new fella (Any suggestions about a sobriquet for this one?) was in the area and we were able to spend the weekend together. It was so much fun. We had an ossum time.
But it also underscored for me how much I’m missing out by virtue of the simple fact that we live 3,000 miles apart. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not second guessing the relationship itself. It’s just that I spend so much of my time with him simply on the phone or looking at a jumpy webcam view of him. When we’re together in person, I feel shocked into silence over just seeing him and getting to spend time joking around, talking about art or philosophy or movies or music or television. I feel like I didn’t say everything I want to say. I didn’t get to show him all the things I wanted to show him. As soon as I kissed him goodbye at his gate in the airport I wanted to call him to tell him about things I was seeing and thinking.
It “sucks” that he reads this blog sometimes (and I showed him how to use Google Reader this weekend, so now he’s following me) and I can’t just tell you ALL the crazy stuff I think about him — like how he vaguely resembles a chimpanzee sometimes when he smiles real big. (Don’t tell him I said that.) And about how much I love that he tolerates me singing in the car — I am nearly tone deaf — along with Top 40’s radio hits — as if I didn’t notice how many times this weekend he pointed out how obnoxious those songs are. And about how he tested me and noticed exactly how bad I am at recognizing faces, which is an embarrassing level of bad.
But whatevs. He’s sweetie and we have a stupid amount of fun together.
His brain amazes me. In one moment we’re talking about unicorns and Britney Spears and then next moment we’re talking about something called the Principle of Explosion and riddles about coins. He listens to me rave on about how a painting in a restaurant is both an impressive display for a young artist and a disgusting conjunction of “Hopperesque use of lighting,” “Cezannesque perspective,” and “Lichtensteinian pop-art influences.” AND he seems to be impressed with that identification if nothing else.
He’s coming to help me move in a couple of weeks. I’m excited about that. I’m excited about moving. I’m excited about seeing him. I’m excited about moving and him being with me to help out. I’m just excited.
I’m excited about the opportunity my job is presenting me right now. Things are in a state of transition and it could fall out in any number of directions. I’m pretty sure I know how it will go, but there’s a lot of work to be done to make sure that’s the case. And on top of that, there’s a lot of work to make sure I achieve what I intend to achieve while I’m in Nashville. It’s going to be tough. Really tough. But I’m looking forward to it because I am pretty sure I will be granted a fairly significant amount of latitude to make things happen. And if they do happen, I have a lot to gain.
I’m sorry for all the vague language here, but I can’t disclose much. I can’t disclose because I have clients who follow me and I have co-workers who follow me. So, suffice it to say that I am optimistic about the way things are going to play out, but I also know that it’s not an easy row to plow. (I’m so gonna rock this.)
You haven’t missed anything. I still live in NYC for the moment. I’ll be moving away on September 4th, 2010, though.
As long-time readers of this blog know, I’ve maintained an alias, Trey Givens, for my online life. It’s not impossible to track me down in real life using that alias, but one does have to put forth a little more effort. In maintaining that alias, I also filtered personal details from the internet so as to make it just a little more difficult to find me.
But over the past year or so, I decided to “come out” and put my real name associated with this blog and the online persona of “Trey Givens” together in an effort to start building a personal brand.
I really saw little risk in doing so given the number of people I know personally, professionally, and through distant observation who put personal information online. Plus, I’ve been blogging since 2003 about a WIDE range of personal topics and it hasn’t lead to anything bad.
Until now. Sort of.
A while back a gentleman contacted me via the internet. I can’t remember even how he said he found me. It was probably YouTube. He was friendly although a little awkward. I was polite, but I felt I was also a bit distant and cool, for example, I wouldn’t answer his questions verbosely and sometimes I wouldn’t respond at all.
But he continued to contact me. He tried to friend me on Facebook, but I declined it. He’s asked me a barrage of questions anonymously via Formspring. I know the questions are from him because the content and style of the questions matched his way of communicating. He would send me random emails with odd articles that he thought would interest me. And now and then he would IM me.
On the surface, this doesn’t sound very bad, take this excerpt from one of our first instant message conversation:
[21:34] Internet Stranger: are you into rifles now?[21:35] Trey: I grew up in the south. There were plenty of guns around.[21:35] Trey: That photo is from OCON. We went out shooting one day.[21:35] Internet Stranger: I dislike guns[21:35] Trey: Why?[21:36] Internet Stranger: I am an RN and have seen alot of gun related injuries Trey[21:36] Trey: I suppose you see a lot of car-related injuries as well, no?[21:37] Internet Stranger: during wet weather[21:37] Internet Stranger: full moon=more gun related[21:38] Internet Stranger: that’s been my experience[21:38] Trey: *shrug*[21:38] Internet Stranger: as in Atlas?[21:39] Trey: No.[21:39] Internet Stranger: oh[21:40] Internet Stranger: do you still have your plants?[21:40] Trey: Yes.[21:40] Internet Stranger: cool[21:40] Trey: Most of them are on the fire escape right now.[21:40] Trey: Two of them are in the kitchen window.[21:40] Internet Stranger: is it hot in nyc?[21:41] Trey: It’s warm and very humid.[21:41] Trey: Most unpleasant in my opinion.[21:41] Internet Stranger: ugh[21:41] Internet Stranger: cool here[21:42] Internet Stranger: I wish you could get on the roof there[21:42] Trey: If I wanted, I’m sure I could find a way.[21:42] Trey: The fire escape goes up there.[21:43] Internet Stranger: You appeared to gravitate to the roof/view in the previous apt.[21:43] Internet Stranger: aren’t you curious about the current view?[21:44] Trey: Mmm… not really.
Admittedly, I could have been MORE distant in that conversation and discouraged further contact, but that’s the kind of conversation that most people would have bailed on in two minutes. It’s a barrage of non sequitur questions to which I respond rather tersely. Notice that this was our very first conversation and he is referencing particular things in my home and from my Facebook profile.
It was off-putting from the start but because I tend to extend a lot of benefit of the doubt to people and so I maintained a civil discourse much like the above… since July.
Finally, I reached the end of my patience with him today when he asked for my address so that he could send me money for my birthday. Apparently, he didn’t understand from my post about my move to Nashville that I was joking when I mentioned my birthday and said, “Send cash so that I don’t have to move a lot of bulky presents.” He even suggested that he might send it to my work. I asked him repeatedly not to do anything. Then, he explained that he thought I was getting fired and that’s why I am moving to Nashville. Apparently, in his experience, “We want you to run the agency business there” is code for “we really wish you would quit and leave us in peace.” Anyway, the whole exchange was so perplexing and strange and — again — overly familiar that I just couldn’t take it any more and decided I needed to address it.
[12:44] Trey: Can I be frank with you?[12:45] Trey: You make me uneasy.[12:45] Internet Stranger: why?[12:45] Trey: You’re overly familiar and somewhat presumptuous.[12:45] Trey: I realize that my openness on my blog and willingness to interact with people online engenders that sort of thing.[12:46] Internet Stranger: I’m sorry[12:46] Trey: But most people understand that there is still a boundary between me and those I don’t know.[12:47] Internet Stranger: Perhaps you should block me if you feel uncomfortable[12:47] Trey: I would prefer not to do that.[12:47] Trey: But I would appreciate it if you remained a silent observer in my life.[12:47] Internet Stranger: Because I can’t say that I will cease contact[12:48] Trey: Why?[12:48] Internet Stranger: I see something I think might interest you, and it’s tempting to send it[12:49] Internet Stranger: regardless of the format[12:49] Trey: Are you this way with all the people you see on the internet?[12:51] Internet Stranger: I guess[12:51] Trey: You guess?[12:51] Trey: It’s very odd and off-putting.[12:51] Trey: My BF says you’re stalking me and that I should block you immediately.[12:51] Trey: I prefer to grant more beenfit of the doubt.[12:52] Trey: but your behavior makes me very uncomfortable.[12:52] Trey: You’re overly familiar and you don’t seem to pick up on the standard cues of civility that would discourage further contact.[12:54] Trey: It’s actually this sort of situation that lead me to maintain an alias online for so many years.[12:56] Internet Stranger: I would appreciate it if you would block me from further contact then. I don’t want to bother you anymore. And I’m sorry for dismissing your cues.[12:56] Trey: See, the fact that you put it on me to stop you from behaving this way is part of the problem.[12:56] Trey: I am going to block you now.[12:56] Trey: Be well.
See? Without saying so, he implied here that he feels compelled to contact me. He doesn’t trust himself to respect my wishes and leave me alone. Scary. I’m not saying “stalker,” but this is as close as I really care to get. Creepster. That’s what I’ll say.
And so now I’ve blocked him from commenting on my blog. I blocked him from Facebook, YouTube, and from emailing me. I blocked him from everywhere I could readily do so.
I’m not really re-thinking attempting to hide my identity again, but maybe I’ll try to remember to cut things like this off earlier, before they can get to the, “I JUST CAN’T STOP EMAILING/FORMSPRINGING/YOUTUBING/FACEBOOKING/IMING YOU” point.
Last night.
No, I’m not, which makes me wonder how old you think I am and how old you think a person is when they should stop dancing. It also makes me sad to think that there’s no dancing in your life.
It’s entertaining.
I was really surprised to learn that even though he cursed out customers, announced his resignation, stole two beers, jumped from the emergency exist and broke two or three laws in the process he wasn’t immediately terminated from the company. As I understand it, he still has his job and has asked to return to work.
I understand how a person can get frustrated with customers and in spite of what people say the customer is not always right. I think it is incumbent upon managers to train employees on how to deal with difficult situations with an emphasis on excusing one’s self when one sees that they are losing their cool.
So, yeah. I think it was funny and the sort of thing I sometimes fantasize about doing, but is really completely unacceptable.
I don’t really care much for champagne, but I am very pleased by the decision, yes.
No. I have never been on coke. What is wrong with you?
I don’t think I’m qualified to say.
I don’t think so, but the image of an inflamed vagina that you’ve just put in my head might be one of the most offensive things ever.
Well, my opinion of promiscuity in general is pretty low regardless of who does it. It also isn’t clear to me why I should be all that concerned with what a bunch of people I don’t know are doing, but I am told I SHOULD CARE A WHOLE LOT.
So, here’s what I think: I don’t think the ideological flaws that lead to promiscuity are particular to gays. I think most straight people in the mainstream of our culture have those same ideas but that it is easier for gays to act upon them.
See, the mystical underpinnings of our altruist ethics demands that we seek platonic ideals in love. So, this leads people to that sex is depraved and wrong. This is at clear odds with reality, which leaves the individual to try to put on a show of buying into it — either by appearing to be celibate or by getting married and acting like that “holy” institution doesn’t involve hot, sweaty, freaky sexytimes or by simply being willing to accept the consequences and pursuing value-less sex at a whim. Since gays are inherently at odds with the traditional view of this ideology there is a greater tendency to eschew an outward appearance of conforming to it.
I predict that as homosexuality becomes more accepted in our culture and gays are permitted to marry, the outward appearance of promiscuity will diminish — assuming also the current ideology remains in place.
I’m sure it’s not a requirement for entering the state. I’ll say that much.
My apartment is NOT a mouse-infested firetrap with no roof access!
It’s still the same job. It’s just in a new office. And if someone offers me $100 to eat a tiny, little can of cat food again, I will take it!
That’s not a question, but thank you for sharing this with me and the world.
