Apr 27 2005
Underlying Message
I have worked for 7+ years after graduation. I have never come across someone like this woman. She is my colleague whom I don’t come into contact until one recent project. She is one of my focal points for Malaysia’s component. Her role is to help me liaise with Business on research needs and some nitty-gritty stuff. Oh, BTW, I am a market research manager, responsible for research projects done in the Asia Pacific regions.
This woman is extremely difficult to deal with. I don’t report to her, she is not my internal client, and she is no one to me actually. Not that she is demanding or being difficult to satisfy (I won’t care anyway), but she likes to play politics and she plays lousily. She always tries to infer underlying message in whatsoever communications to her – verbal, written, body language etc.
I take the recent 2 incidents as example. These 2 incidents really spoilt my days.
First incident:
When I asked her to confirm brand list used for a particular questionnaire, she returned a brand list without our company’s brand. I challenged her because that doesn’t make sense. Come on! When you do research to find out what happens out there, don’t you want to know how your company performs? She replied and confirmed our brand is not required.
I spoke to my boss, who thought it was weird too, and asked me to confirm with the marketing manager (MM) - more superior than this woman. After confirming with the MM, I sent her an email to finalize the changes. To make her feel better, I wrote, “Please can you confirm whether the changes are acceptable to you. I will take the focal points words as final.” I thought by saying this, I respect her enough.
The next day morning at 8am, she called me and screamed at me. First, condemning that I used the abbreviation of “MM” which leads to confusion. According to her, MM can mean Mahathir Mohammed (our former PM). Well, the term ‘MM’ was used in this organization regionally and globally, I really wonder if she has any competency problem that leads to the confusion?? How can I mean confirming brand list with our former PM?
Then she said I did not respect her by checking with my boss and the MM, she was furious about it. Well, I must get my job done correctly. If what she did doesn’t make sense I have to correct it. Furthermore it was my boss’s instruction! She screamed at me for nearly an hour. She kept saying that I have underlying intention when I did this. Well in fact, I only have one intention, which is to get the right brand list to do my job.
Second incident:
On the same project as well, we have decided to interview only 3 types of customers. On one morning, we had a few emails flowing around, because this lady somewhat forgot and was making confusing statement involving another 2 types of customers (agriculture and one other). When it was finally confirmed not included, I sent out the finalized questionnaire to everyone including her.
She replied my email with a one liner message:
“Just a note to highlight on the error B2B transport ~ agriculture (rubber, cocoa, etc). It’s not updated here.”
For God’s sake, I didn’t understand this message at all. So I replied:
“Seriously, I don’t understand what you are trying to communicate in this email. Can you elaborate? Are you asking me to include it?”
Walao! This somewhat offended her because she thought I had underlying message. She called me up, screamed at me. Asked me what was my problem, why do I have to be so mean to her. She thought her message was very clear and I was trying to make her life difficult by asking her to elaborate. She thought I was very sarcastic for not understanding what she wrote. She was not convinced that I just didn’t understand.
To convince her, I even told her to assume that I was stupid lut-tut, and I just don’t understand. Like that also cannot. Do I look very intelligent that I must understand everything people writes/says?
Seriously, I just did not understand it, that’s all. Very straight-forward, no underlying message. But she just did not accept it, insisting that I have underlying message.
She even had the gut to scold me for writing her email, and I should have called if I really don’t understand. I was silly enough to let her scolded me on this point – I should have told her that I wrote this in email because she sent me an email – I was just replying to hers. If she thinks she can’t write good emails to elaborate, she should have called me in the first place and not just sent me a one liner message like that.
After the conversation ended, I wanted to ensure that my email was alright, I forwarded it to my boss to ask for her opinion. Glad my boss told me that this lady has the reputation of doing this to everyone. So, it wasn’t my problem. Whew!
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