Despite the fact that I have made my living for the last 14 years as a professional communicator, I often talk, um… wrong. I have a real problem with pronouns, for instance. Last week I was on the phone with an HR Lady and in answering her question “How did you learn about our company? I told her, “I met the president of the company at a party and he asked him to send me his resume”
I once sent an unsolicited email to an ad agency who I hoped might hire me. I figured I could take a jauntier tone and wrote, “I write like a champ in any media” Moments after I hit send I realized I had just made a grammatical error in a sentence extolling my skills as a writer. Guess what? Never heard from them. I’m sure they were happy that I gave them a quick reason to avoid reading the rest of the email, like the way I felt when I got cover letters with typos in the first line. Or the time I got a resume addressed to me as Pubic Relations Coordinator.
I wish.
When I worked for the newspaper I called people all the time, and some of them didn’t want to talk to me. On more than one occasion this exchange occurred:
“Hello, this is David Thomas from The Chapel Hill News”
“Yes?
“Fine thanks, how are you?”
My greatest fear was that I would one day end a professional conversation with “I love you” This probably says something really peculiar and/or pathetic about me, but hey, I don’t keep any secrets from you.
I have walked up to a receptionist more than once and said, “This is David Thomas” like I was on the radio or something. “And I’ll be right back after this short break” I’m always happy to find I’m not the only person who has problems with everyday talkifying. When I worked at Big Telecommunications Company Who Sucks and Laid Me Off, a friend walked into my cube one day and announced, “Hey, it’s Alyssa! That’s what we say on the phone, hon, not what we say in person. Still, it was endearing.
Speaking of talking, allow me to be the very first person ever to write about how electronic mediums medias things have changed communication. I spend far too much time IMing with Adda “at least from a getting-anything-else-accomplished perspective”, and since she’s screamingly funny, I end up typing “lol a lot. I tried to resist it at first as lazy shorthand, but then I just gave in. She is trying harder than I am though, and her current alternative to “lol is “hink” I like it. Hink hink. HOL. Rebecky also went through a similar soul-searching process. She writes “haha!, which is kind of weird but funny, sort of like watching a recent immigrant tell his first joke in English. “I wonder if they’ll make their way into speech. Wanna start a trend? The next time you hear something funny, keep a deadpan expression and say “rofflemao””
Adda and I have realized that most IM shorthand is dishonestly hyperbolic. I mean, seriously, how often are you actually laughing out loud, let alone rolling on the floor laughing your ass off? You wouldn’t be able to type, for one thing. With that in mind, we created a more accurate abbreviation: LQTS – “laughing quietly to self”