I want to pit over-sensitive, defensive people. I have to work with someone in my volunteer work who is like this and it drives me batty. For example:
She’s terse, meaning uses few words in email so I often am not clear what she’s asking or telling me. So I sent her an email asking for clarification and a side note saying that she’s sometimes terse and I need to understand better. She replied with a snotty tone as if told her she was rude. Apparently in her book (do you guys read it that way too?) terse=rude. I wrote back to try to settle things down and explain that I did NOT mean to imply she was rude and it just snowballed with her getting pissier and pissier. So I’m just shutting the hell up with her.
Also once in the past in a similar email bitchfight that popped up, I said something like I was trying not to be defensive and she wrote back clearly misreading that I had accused her of being defensive. (Well, obviously she is but I did not say that. I’m not a fight picker.)
She tells me she feels like I pick apart everything she says, which is funny because I feel like everything I write gets a snotty, defensive reply. Argh!
I hope you realize that you’re kind of coming across as the over-sensitive, defensive one.
“Terse” is a loaded word. Yes, it can mean succinct. But usually (in my experience) it is used to describe someone who is gruff or abrupt. Indeed, when you said she’s terse, I pictured a gruff person. Not just someone of few words.
So it is perfectly understandable that she got defensive. If I had been her, I probably would have shot you the finger (through the wall) and then emailed: “Very well. You can stop by my office anytime today if you need to talk.” But I can’t fault her for being bothered by you calling her gruff, even if that wasn’t your intention. (I try to keep my emails succinct too. Because it infuriates me when I email someone a simple question and they send me a wall of text without actually answering it.)
There are people I work who I know I can email without any problem. And then there are those people I know I need to either call on the phone (as much as I hate to) or talk to face-to-face. If you frequently have these situations with this coworker, then you need to avoid emailing her.
I agree that terse is not the best word to have used but at the same time it seems as if she is hard to deal with so I wouldn’t give it much thought, just move on
Wel, she’s from philly so she is in fact somewhat gruff. But I try not to say that because it would piss her right the hell off, lol!
What I am thinking is that I’m walking on eggshells too much with her and should just stop trying to explain myself.
But she carries lots of baggage. Like, someone else got on her case last year about not saying please or thank you, so her first snotty response to me today was sooooo sorry she didn’t say please or thank you. She also brought up a situation a few months ago where she did something wrong and apologized at the time and it wasn’t even in my mind but she thought I was beating her up over it all this time later.
All this because I was trying to gently ask her to write more clearly. I don’t have this much trouble with anybody else.
She comes across as gruff. But that doesn’t mean she’s gruff. (Or that she’s gruff because she’s from Philly.)
It sounds like she’s tired of being scolded and corrected. Not knowing her, I can’t say if her feelings are justified. But I do know that it can be hard being misunderstood all the time, and not knowing exactly what people are reacting to.
Here is what I think is a good life lesson for everyone (if you don’t already know it) -if you are having a problem with someone, deal with the specific elements of the thing at hand (the email instructions, for example) without attempting to tell the person what is wrong with her.
So you are faced with an email that is ambiguous due (you think) to it being incomplete. You don’t have to tell her that her email is incomplete (or “terse”) and therefore ambiguous. Just ask the question that you are left with, to wit:
“I’m sorry, I’m not clear whether “frimfram at the krotz” means I should do a, or b, or a then b, or something else. Could you clarify? Thanks.”
That’s not walking on eggshells, it’s a simple declarative assertion of what you don’t understand about the email. You are not saying anything about her, only about this one message.
She might respond with simple clarification, and/or she might apologize, or she might blow up anyway. If she does the last, it will clearly be her problem rather than yours. If she does the first, you may have to repeat this process any number of times before she gets the message. If she does the second, you may have contributed your small mite to increasing the understanding and goodwill in the world.
But in any case, you will have done the right thing.
You ASS. You take that back. I am NOT FUCKING DEFENSIVE! I’m just really fucking tired of your slights and insults, you cheese eating black shit clogged asshole!
Lol, thanks guys for lightening my mood. Also thanks to Roderick, that’s a well thought out bit of advice. I’ll try to do that from now on. My intention wasn’t to point out what was wrong with her although I can see it might come across that way, but more trying to explain why I didn’t understand. But I’ll stop trying to explain, it’s not necessary.
Is there some reason you couldn’t have just asked for clarification? “When you say…I’m unsure if you mean…or…”, “Do you mean X or Y? I’m unclear.”, etc, etc.
Letting her learn to be clearer from, re addressing her own vagueness, repeatedly.
Y’know, instead of from being scolded by another adult/colleague.
It seems like that might have been a better choice, in this instance, and certainly in the future.
A lot of therapists try to get their awkward clients to be better socialized (the ones who don’t work for a living) by doing volunteer work. I’ve seen it a lot where fellow volunteers have been volunteering at something because their doctor told them it would be good. I’ve seen other volunteer disasters where socially impossible people get into volunteer work to get a position of minor power and lord it over others. Usually at condo associations.
I have a feeling, though, that this is exactly the type of email the OP would describe as terse (never mind that brief, direct, and clear is exactly how work email should be).
JcWoman, did you ever get the clarification you were after? Sometimes you can be easily distracted when it comes to conveying important information that people want to find out.
Sort of but I didn’t understand her clarification either. I just dropped the issue. It was something about how she wanted to buy some things from our inventory (no problem) and that marysue will buy some. Couldn’t figure out if she meant she’d be sharing the ones she bought with marysue or she was letting me know that marysue would also be asking for some.
Re: the comment about unsocialized people doing volunteer work… Pretty salient point, that. After pondering why it happened (specifically my role in triggering the pissing match) with this feedback I think I understand where I went off the rails. This would have never happened with my boss or coworkers at my paid job, so why did it happen here? I think it’s because this volunteer work often blurs the lines between business and social, so I was thinking that we were friends. I don’t think she cares to consider me a friend actually, despite being friendly when we’re working events, sharing rooms and travel and such. With this insight, I think my path forward is to act just all business with her like I am in my paid job. Not cold, just businesslike.
