Quote:
Originally posted by TheLegacy
I especially like this "It's long been an adage: if you really want to piss people off...speak in complete sentences. It will do it every time.  "
I learned a long time ago when my mother started yelling at me that if I spoke softly to her she got furious thinking I was treating her as a child. Eventually she calmed down and in the future rarely raised her voice to me again. yet today I simply ignore anyone who is negative - rather keep my life filled with positive people. There are times I have refused to work with someone in this industry because they are extremely negative or treat others improperly.
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OK...now I'm getting scared. It was the "soft voice" thing.
Once when my children had kids over, I bellowed (I bellow well, I have a certificate, in fact) "If you don't clean that room you're going to get a beating!" One of the friends obviously expressed concern, and I clearly heard my youngest daughter say "oh, don't worry, she says that all the time but she never really does it."
Oops. Busted.
However, if Mommy spoke softly...it was an indication that Hell Had Come To Breakfast. On another day, I walked into a living room full of children, a couple of them my own, and said very softly "get in there and clean that room right now." Ever see kids fly? *All* of them ran to the bedroom and I swear not one foot touched the ground.
Speaking softly is an excellent technique for dealing with screaming people. They have to calm down to hear what you just said, then seem to mimic your delivery.
When I first began posting on YNOT, back in '97, I never got a reply to my posts. I had wanted to appear intelligent, competent, thoughtful...all the things one would want one's business associates to use as an evaluation. Someone at a convention once said "no one answered because no one understood a word you said."
Oh.
Overshot the mark a bit, did I?
Then, of course, the accusation "I don't like you because you talk down to people." I explained rather at length that wasn't what "talking down" meant. If I'd wanted to "talk down" to a person, I'd assume the person was stupid and use very...small...words. I do believe the individual's dislkie deepened to hatred at that point.
One can't win them all.
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