Appassionato

Monotonous + rigid = professional?

Categorised as Rants & tagged with language.

Have you ever noticed that in an attempt to sound “pro­fes­sional”, perhaps, things come out mono­ton­ous and rigid?

Let’s look at dic­tion­ar­ies. Why is it that they always expect you to go round and round until you find your answer? Back in school, I remember teachers always telling us that a defin­i­tion answer should not contain the word we were asked to define. And yet, the first defin­i­tion you find in a dic­tion­ary often gives you no answer at all. Taking an example…¹

pruden­tial adj. 1. Arising from or char­ac­ter­ized by prudence.

prudence n. 1. The state, quality, or fact of being prudent.

(and finally…)

prudent adj. 1. Wise in handling practical matters; exer­cising good judgment or common sense.

But I’ve seen worse…

chancery n., pl. -ies. 1. a. A court of chancery. b. The pro­ceed­ings and practice of a court of chancery; equity.

…

Anywho, I couldn’t find the answer I was looking for until I scrolled half-way down the page.

Aside from dic­tion­ar­ies, call centres piss me off. I was trying to call the Inland Revenue Depart­ment (gov­ern­ment tax agency) to ask about a little question that took two minutes to resolve. But I was having to hold on to the phone for at least twenty minutes while com­plain­ing about it on MSN.

First I get some annoying music, then suddenly it stops and I think “Ooooh it’s coming”, then it switches to some Maori song. That probably happened six or seven times until I got another stop. I heard someone say “Hi” so I said “Hi”, and the robotic, mono­ton­ous voice says “… Thanks for holding on the line…” By this time, I felt really stupid I was talking to a robot and the robot babbles on but not too long after­wards, the same robot says “You’re speaking with ******, how may I help you?” It was then natural for me to hesitate and process through my head whether they decided to name their robots or was I finally lucky enough to hear a human being (despite her sounding like a robot). A quick tempta­tion came to me, prodding me to ask her, “Are you a robot?” But I wasn’t rude enough to do so.

It’s this thing with bur­eau­cracy. Everything needs to be in order, I suppose there’s good and bad sides to it, but then sometimes you wait so long for someone to answer your call, and they direct you to a different depart­ment, then another depart­ment, then another and another. Essen­tially, you walk in circles, again.

I can’t really blame them though. It’s a common per­cep­tion to most, if not all of us that pro­fes­sion­al­ism is defined by monotone and rigidity. All the inform­a­tion, Terms of Service and policies in “pro­fes­sional” busi­nesses are written in straight, rigid tone. Do most people even read them?

On a side note, I finally got my Internet bandwidth uncapped!

1. Sourced from Answers.com. [↩]