yes there are quite a few USA’ers who do the exact same thing. But I have never seen it so prevalent. IOW, there are numerous departments with numerous individuals and they all do it. I have run across it, but not within numerous individuals all at the same company.
the individuals here that are specifically german are very business focused, not much into “small talk”.
BTW, msmith537 - I like your stereo typing!
Nava you make an excellent point, that arrogance knows no borders. I probably don’t always come across like the wonderful charming person I know myself to be.
Well, just make sure you’re her preferred gender first; it is exceedingly rude for a foreigner to put his finger in the dyke. Ahem.
When I moved back here from the UK it so happened that my first boss was also from England. So when I came to this job, my boss eventually worked up the courage to tell me, “Duke, you don’t need to tell me ‘thank you’ in an e-mail when you are sending me something I’ve asked for.” I still do that.
An idea which may be completely wrong… I wonder whether the “have you thought of X?” is a mistranslation of “ah, you’ve thought of X?/you’re planning on doing X next?” or something like that. I’ve worked with Germans who sometimes did things like that, from their facial expression and tone of voice it was clear that they were actually expressing approval, but the phrasing was totally off.
Sometimes a direct translation of something that’s a polite formula in one language comes out as spit-in-your-eye insulting in another one. Are your Belgians French-speaking or Flemish-speaking? I know we have several Dopers who speak German.
The inspiration that led to me remembering that? A game, translated from German to English, where some enemies are called “prisoners” when they should be “jailers.”
Ah yes, I am flashing back to being forced to attend a “sensitivity training” seminar aimed at keping employees from sexually harassing each other when I was working for a US-based multinational. The first call I got when I got back to my desk was from one of the Latin American partners, who proceeded to make small talk with me about the black-market price of Viagra.
Do I understand you correctly that the exchange is on the lines of
subsidiary proposes to head office that X be done
head office instructs subsidiary to do X, without reference to 1.
?
In that case, is what you object to that the respondent does not explicitly reference that X was first mentioned by you? Or was it that X was be done by them not you?
The issue is that I already said that I will be doing X. I then do not need to be told to do X, since I already said that I will be doing that. the better response would be either silence, or ask for clarification “When will X be done?”, or even “is X the right thing to do, have you considered doing Y?”. Any of those would be a fine response.
But if I said, “i am going to close the door behind me when I leave”, why would you say “hey, make sure you close the door behind you when you leave”, unless you are trying to be a condescending ass or merely amusing? If its amusing, I recommend doing that in person, so that I can see the smirk and smirk with you.
Also what you might take as just a conversation in e-mail form might be considered as the equivalent of business letters by your counterpart.
If different companies were involved, I’d take (if push comes to shove)
A: i am going to close the door behind me when I leave
B: make sure you close the door behind you when you leave
as a contract between the two companies of A and B, for A to close the door when he leaves (assuming A and B can be assumed by their counterpart to have authority in matters of doors being closed), while the first part would just be an unilateral statement.
nice try, but the CEO was part of the original email chain wherein I said “I’ll be doing X”, and no additional people were copied in their reply of “otternell you should do X”
I very much appreciate your perspective, but those were issues that I considered. Even if they were going to be informing someone; a better way to do it is “see below, otternell is going to do x.”
No they were truly telling me to do something I had already told them I would be doing.
To be fair, its not a European thing I am sure, its just a jerk thing. And there are plenty of those in the US. I guess I should have made this a “I pit my coworkers who do this (and other) annoying things”. but what an annoying thread title!
It might have except that I just ran out of non jerk options. Because of the way Dutch is structured, a statement like “and x is the next step” can be a problem in translation and even if the person to whom you are speaking is ever so proficient in English. Use of the verb “to be” is nearly begging for a misunderstanding because in place of it the Dutch use a dizzying array of verbs, some of which are reflexive, and they also use specific placement of clauses. This lends great specificity to language use and makes it fairly precise in certain ways where English often is not – but we don’t think of it as imprecise because we indicate the actor in other places in the sentence.
However my recollection (though it has been some years since I had to communicate with anyone in French) is that French is as sloppy as English in this way so the non-jerk out has I think been closed.
in retrospect, I should have stuck it in MPSIMS too.
actually, after I saw teh “mini rants” thing, it should have been there. I don’t care enough to argue any more, but I don’t want to be the jerk that starts a thread and then abandons it!
At this point, I am hoping it will die a quiet death, as its just not that important.
They are annoying, but really all humans are, so ultimately I must pit even myself!
also, as is also true for the Belgians and French that the OP works with, English is probably (the email evinces this) not her native language. If your going to work with non-native speakers of your language and your lucky enough to have them adapt to you rather than the other way around, you may want to cut them some slack.
there’s also dopers who speak Bulgarian, Czech, Spanish. What does German have to do with Flemish? You know Flemish is Dutch, right?