Last week I ordered 40 halves of chicken from a local caterer for our family reunion. The caterer, Nelson’s, provides chicken for organizational fundraisers all over our county every weekend. The sales rep told me on the phone that we could pick up our order from one of those locations, and that we should get it from “the cooker, not the organization.”
Bear with me — this has a point. In my mind, because the cooking apparatus and the organization are not parallel “things,” the word cooker as she had used it registered more as the cook. (More on parallel construction another time.) I don’t know if the initial miscommunication was between her and me, or what came later . . .
When we got to the location Sunday, I told Art that we’d been instructed to go to the cooker, thinking cook. He stopped by the cooking apparatus but asked the organizational people about our chicken, and I felt like he hadn’t been listening to me. We got our chicken, and all the way home that one tiny miscommunication grew into a tangled web of hurt feelings: mine, because I felt unlistened to; his, because he felt like he’d been treated like a child who really had done nothing wrong. We put it to rest, though, and the rest of the day was fine. But it just goes to show how fast things can go south when communication gets messed up. Sometimes the little things will get you the most. And no one is immune.
It’s not safe to assume that our unpublished thoughts and assumptions are not perverting our communication. You’d think we could relax about this with the people who know us best, but sometimes we need to be especially diligent with them. The people we love the best deserve our best.
