Watch Your Tone

I worked some ridiculous hours this week. Maybe about 34. (It's ridiculous because I should only be working about 20.) Anyway, I learned a lot about indirect communication. By indirect communication I mean tone of voice and body language.

My co-workers and I deal with a lot of "lesser educated people" (effin' morons). We're generally pretty patient people, no one of us having a shorter fuse than the average person. That fuse usually gets lit in about the first half hour of work and keeps burning until that one customer comes along and we "explode." We don't get mean, it just gets harder and harder to keep what we say under our breath under our breath.

I am a supervisor, so I'm used to dealing with problems that my employees create for me, as well as the customers. This is nothing new. I watched my co-worker, another supervisor with 11 years of experience at the position, get very frustrated. She told me about her "one customer" and the experience that she had had with that customer while I was at lunch. Then the customer came back and I saw why that person was one that we consider to be "lesser educated." She had apparently had a long drive from Hull to Randolph and decided that she could park in front of the store's entrance, in the fire lane that says "NO PARKING", instead of in a parking spot. (There were two open spaces in the very front row, but she's too good for that.) My brain stumbled over the mountain of questions that this brought up that no one could answer and my tongue tied trying to form one.

My co-worker's words were the same that we gave to any customer when the woman came back. She started arguing with us. We defended ourselves with "Store policy." We're not making this stuff up, it's quite legitimate. Anyone in the store, who knows what they're doing, would tell her the same thing. After a couple minutes, the tone of my co-worker's voice changed. It was angrier and angrier as the conversation went on. It wasn't an argument, it was very contained. Her tone reflected the adamancy of her sticking to store policy rather than anger. I could see a clear difference.

I watched the body language of the cashiers that I manage. The ones who had been there the longest seemed tired, worn. The newer, fresher ones had energy in the way they stood at their registers. Even the way they walked around as they picked things off the shelves that belonged elsewhere and the way they moved there arms were different. I kept track of my own body language as well

I  drew the conclusion that when we start our shifts, we are very polite and formal with the ways we present ourselves. As time goes on, as slow as that may be, we become more informal, and borderline lackadaisical by the end. Sometimes we half-sleep by the end of the night. (Yes, I can do certain parts of my job with my eyes closed.)

It's very interesting to "people watch" and just see how they go about their individual days, in both the sense of communication as well as an anthropological sense. Try it next time you have some free time in a public place, like the food court at a mall. You'll see all kinds of people communicating, whether intentionally or not, without saying a word.