The Artless Science of Communication

A friend called me yesterday with a problem most of us have probably come across in one way or another. Her problem was that she was using email to establish a rapport with a potential date. She had been using email as a social networking tool for some time now, but after catching and then losing too many potential partners she began to see the mistakes she was making as her inability to write with a true voice.

"I think I just offended another man."
"Why?" I asked with authentic concern for my friend and her frequent online dating miles.
"Well, one minute we were having a very pleasant cyber space chat, and without any sinister motive or malicious intent, he dropped me.
"What do you mean dropped?"
"He never answered me back. Innocently I responded to his last note just as seductive and sassy as I had been trying to be up until then, but in the wink of an eye he was gone.
I was left dead in the water. Nada. Call in the pallbearers. Don't send flowers. Donate money instead to my favorite charity. Sayonara. It's over. Last guy out shut off the lights.
"You poor soul! What did you write that was so derelict?
"Well, it was he who approached my court and placed the first serve, and at first it seemed the conversation was going really well. You know, our words were flying smoothly over the net, his, then mine, then his..."
"I get the picture."
"Oh, okay, well, I felt like I was in the 'zone'. Know what I mean?"
Hello? Remember me? I write for a living so yeah, I know all about being in the 'zone.' Go ahead, keep talking."
"Alright, so I think we're having this really good volley and then I whack one back at him and at first it looks high and headed straight over the net, and, and then my heart took a nose dive as I watched it drop out of bounds. "
"And then?"
"And then I just sat back quietly and tried to wait patiently but nothing. He never sent me a ball back."
"So what was in your last note that might have set off this stink bomb?
"I told you already. The flow was so going so smooth I thought we were cool. Two peas in a pod...two minds following the same flight pattern. It's hard work trying to maintain equal levels of flirtatous banter, ancient spiritual wisdom and relevant personal information. Who knows which part of I am Woman You are Man turned him immediately off."
"Yeah, I get it. Sometimes that happens in my columns as well. I think I'm expressing my thoughts articulately and brilliantly and then, then I get a comment railing against my inability to see the injustice of everything I stood up for, so, yeah, communication can be an upstream task sometimes. Hey, look what happened to Obama - he got called into the principals' office recently for possible plagiarism, and then in a recent interview his wife, Michelle, apparently she made a controversial statement about never being more proud of this country than now. And who could forget that loud and shrill backlash Hillary received the first time Bill was campaigning for the presidency when she stated flat out you'd never catch her in the kitchen baking cookies. Boy did the Betty Crocker and Pillsbury Doughboys raise their collective voices back then.
"I hear you but I think my failure to communicate speaks to a much larger problem."
"Which is?"
"I want to know how people in previous centuries communicated so well?"
"What do you mean?"
"What do you mean what do I mean? Think about it. Pharaohs and Kings and Queens got a hell of a lot done without instant message, email, fax, cell or text. How did wars ever get going if they first had to weigh all the options, and then before actually declaring war, they first had to send out a soldier of good conscious and quick steed to travel, God knows how many hundreds of miles, to bring a message of menace to another war monger authority, and don't forget, they had to allow for time loss in case their messenger was slaughtered simply for bringing the message, because back then, 'Please don't kill me, I'm only the messenger,' was the real deal. And think about the game Telephone. You know, where you whisper something in someone's ear and then they're supposed to whisper the exact same thing in someone else's ear and so on and so on. At the end it's never what it started out as. Makes you think huh?"
"About what?"
"Well, before there was stone and an etching rock, or paper and ink, what if this forlorn messenger completely forgot the damn message before he ever got to his destination, and the undereducated, possible illiterate messenger had to put the message into his own words which are never quite as eloquent as your own. I mean what would be the point of the whole exercise if that happened? And I'm sure from time to time it did. So if your mail carrier wasn't offed, he would have to then ride back hundreds of miles with an answer!! And in the meantime you're doing what? I can't stand having to wait ten, twenty minutes to get an email back from some guy. Imagine having to wait months for a reply! It absolutely boggles my imagination to take into consideration that humanity has progressed for thousands of years on the back of a horse, and I can't even keep a chat line going because of one false word. "