Why is it that doctors (including physiotherapists and such) think that they can leech people's time? Yes, health is important, and we need these people, but they seem to think it's normal to let people wait for stretches of time without even apologising or informing them of the delay. (And people accept this!) Yesterday I had to wait for an HOUR, and including travel time it cost me 2.5 hours of my day... all this for 8 minutes in a room with such an arrogant bastard! (A few weeks ago I had to wait for a doctor's assistant for 45 minutes to receive some instructions and discuss some kind of lousy question form for 5 minutes!) Doctors and probably rich and powerful people seem to be the only ones who think it's normal not to keep appointments and to let people wait without offering any kind of excuse or apology whatsoever.
When I have a deadline to meet and I'm afraid I'm not going to make it, I inform my client and ask his permission to finish it a little bit later. If I didn't, and I just handed it in a day late without informing him of this beforehand, he will get mad, and rightly so. This is called responsibility and communication. Apparently, doctors have no notion of these concepts, or choose to ignore them.
I sometimes think I should just always be half an hour late when visiting doctors, because they will keep me waiting anyway. But you'll always see that you will be called right on time on that day...
Showing posts with label communications. Show all posts
Showing posts with label communications. Show all posts
Saturday, 6 November 2010
Wednesday, 7 July 2010
Communicating
We've been doing it since we were monkeys. First by grunting to each other, then developing languages, writing...and then it kind of stood still for a while. The basics were there though, and people managed and all. But when phones were invented, communicating became a lot easier. Recently, even mobile phones and the Internet were added. Communicating couldn't get any easier, right?
Wrong. It seems to me that although some people become addicted to communicating (*cough* tweeps *cough*), many others somehow don't seem able to handle all these incoming communications, and disregard an X percentage of them, X being.....high ;).
It also seems to me that more and more people do not contact friends by themselves, but wait. And when they are invited to something, they don't reply. So what they seem to be waiting for, I have no idea. But taking initiatives doesn't appear to really bear fruit these days. Thinking of and organising something fun to do with a group of friends takes some time and effort, but it doesn't seem to pay off anymore.
Let me illustrate this with an example: when I invited over 10 people for a fun outing that wasn't that expensive and which I offered well in advance so people would actually be able to come, only three people replied, of which two said they couldn't make it for some reason or other. Now, if people don't want to - or can't - go and give me a reason, I get it. Maybe I should have planned it differently or something. But what I cannot get my head around is 50-80% of people generally not replying at all. And these are not strangers disregarding some newsletter they're not interested in, but friends who are invited to do something fun. I don't even know if they even read the message, but I'm assuming they do, since people may often be lazy, irresponsible and rude, but they are curious. It's human nature. So assuming they read the invitation, they must think it too much of an effort or too hard somehow (may I please sigh?) to reply in one or two sentences explaining why they can't come.
This strikes me as a degradation of human communications and extremely off-putting to organisors. Me being someone who likes and feels the need to organise things (as hardly anyone else seems to), I've been wondering a lot if I should continue to try. On occasion enough people respond to actually do something together, albeit with a smaller group than I had in mind, so it's not as if every attempt is in vain, but when you organise something, you want it to be rewarding, with the ultimate reward naturally being a amazing outing with a group of great people, producing memories to cherish, the culmination of your efforts.
Obviously it does not feel very rewarding to me, hence my dilemma: should I keep trying and probably fail more often than not, or should I give up and hope that maybe someone else gives it a shot (probably also feeling that (s)he will have to do it because no one else will)?
Something else I've been wondering about is: then what is it that these people do?? Since they never appear to have time. Do they have some secret club of friends I don't know about? Or (more likely) do they just spend time with a select few people who are easiest to meet with (living close by, etc.) so it can be done with minimal effort?
This seems to be the key phrase here: minimal effort. It seems that modern communications are making people lazier than ever. Almost daily I am stunned by how passive and inert people have become. Would it be different without modern communications? I don't know. Walking places for a lack of phones or an Internet connection as opposed to chatting on MSN seems quite active to me, but then again, I use modern communications all day long and I do always reply to invitations (even to say no) and make an effort to keep in touch with people. So maybe it's just natural for most people to be lax, and not bound to these modern times, as I've been suggesting, but if that's so, I think it's amazing humans have ever accomplished anything.
Wrong. It seems to me that although some people become addicted to communicating (*cough* tweeps *cough*), many others somehow don't seem able to handle all these incoming communications, and disregard an X percentage of them, X being.....high ;).
It also seems to me that more and more people do not contact friends by themselves, but wait. And when they are invited to something, they don't reply. So what they seem to be waiting for, I have no idea. But taking initiatives doesn't appear to really bear fruit these days. Thinking of and organising something fun to do with a group of friends takes some time and effort, but it doesn't seem to pay off anymore.
Let me illustrate this with an example: when I invited over 10 people for a fun outing that wasn't that expensive and which I offered well in advance so people would actually be able to come, only three people replied, of which two said they couldn't make it for some reason or other. Now, if people don't want to - or can't - go and give me a reason, I get it. Maybe I should have planned it differently or something. But what I cannot get my head around is 50-80% of people generally not replying at all. And these are not strangers disregarding some newsletter they're not interested in, but friends who are invited to do something fun. I don't even know if they even read the message, but I'm assuming they do, since people may often be lazy, irresponsible and rude, but they are curious. It's human nature. So assuming they read the invitation, they must think it too much of an effort or too hard somehow (may I please sigh?) to reply in one or two sentences explaining why they can't come.
This strikes me as a degradation of human communications and extremely off-putting to organisors. Me being someone who likes and feels the need to organise things (as hardly anyone else seems to), I've been wondering a lot if I should continue to try. On occasion enough people respond to actually do something together, albeit with a smaller group than I had in mind, so it's not as if every attempt is in vain, but when you organise something, you want it to be rewarding, with the ultimate reward naturally being a amazing outing with a group of great people, producing memories to cherish, the culmination of your efforts.
Obviously it does not feel very rewarding to me, hence my dilemma: should I keep trying and probably fail more often than not, or should I give up and hope that maybe someone else gives it a shot (probably also feeling that (s)he will have to do it because no one else will)?
Something else I've been wondering about is: then what is it that these people do?? Since they never appear to have time. Do they have some secret club of friends I don't know about? Or (more likely) do they just spend time with a select few people who are easiest to meet with (living close by, etc.) so it can be done with minimal effort?
This seems to be the key phrase here: minimal effort. It seems that modern communications are making people lazier than ever. Almost daily I am stunned by how passive and inert people have become. Would it be different without modern communications? I don't know. Walking places for a lack of phones or an Internet connection as opposed to chatting on MSN seems quite active to me, but then again, I use modern communications all day long and I do always reply to invitations (even to say no) and make an effort to keep in touch with people. So maybe it's just natural for most people to be lax, and not bound to these modern times, as I've been suggesting, but if that's so, I think it's amazing humans have ever accomplished anything.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)