Communication

The recent revelation that the New York City Board of Elections has printed ballots for the upcoming elections with incorrect instructions, reminded me of three personal interactions within the past month in which communication was faulty. The first was with a Verizon technician based in India, whom I called for help in installing a new router. He asked me to use the yellow router cable to connect my router and computer.

In fact the cable is black with a yellow tag. Once I understood what he meant, I plugged the cable into both router and computer, but the desired effect did not follow. "Did you insert both plugs?" he asked. I told him that there was only one plug - the transparent plastic device you pinch in order to insert a cable into a jack - and that I had plugged the other end of the cable into a computer port. "No," he said, "there are two plugs. You insert one into the router and the other into the computer." I was mystified until I noticed that one end of the cable was double-headed, with both a plug and a metal end that goes into the port. Once I understood the construction of the cable, we were able to proceed.

There were several problems leading to difficult communication here. Although his English was fluent, it was sufficiently accented that several times I had to ask him to repeat himself, a difficulty compounded by my defective hearing; he could not see what I was doing; and he mistakenly assumed that I understood the structure of the cable. Background knowledge is assumed in almost all communication and the lack of it impedes comprehension.

In the second incident, the other person was a native speaker of English, we were next to one another, and I had no difficulty hearing him. I was standing on a narrow traffic island on Flatbush Avenue, between Prospect Park and the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, waiting for the light to change, when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to find a tall, large, middle-aged man standing next to me. Smiling, he extended his arm in my direction and, thinking that he wanted to shake my hand, I took his hand. I wondered if he had mistaken me for someone else or if he had used a ploy, sometimes seen abroad, in which a conman or a beggar approaches a tourist. He was clearly surprised. When I understood that in fact he hadn't wanted to shake my hand, I figured that he wanted to shake the hand of the man on the other side of me. I laughed and gave the first man a playful mock punch. But no, he hadn't wanted to shake anyone's hand. Finally, he spoke. "Look behind you." Then I saw that an old lady with a walker was trying to get up onto the traffic island and that I was blocking her way. Once I understood what he wanted, I moved aside, but why in blazes hadn't he spoken up in the first place instead of using gestures?

The third incident occurred only last Shabbat, when I was looking for the opened bottle of Riesling that I had put into the refrigerator the night before, planning to use it as a back up if our lunch guests finished the new bottle we were serving. "Is it in the cupboard?" asked my wife. "No," I said, "I can only find the unopened one." In fact I was looking at last night's bottle. I had forgotten to put the unopened bottle in the refrigerator the night before. It was, as my wife suspected, in the cupboard, but that only came to light later. In the meantime, I had to open a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon instead, a wine that need not be cooled beforehand. Fortunately, it was just enough.

There are many instances of miscommunication between my wife and me, and no doubt some of them are never discovered. When I consider that we share the same language and rules for speaking it and much of the same background knowledge, I conclude that we should be more surprised than we are when two people with much less in common manage to understand each other perfectly.