By Barely Legal
Special to the Legal
Back when I was still in school, my friend (we’ll call her Kristine) and I were having a bad day. And as 20-somethings tend to do, we decided we would drink our cares away. Sometime later, we were stumbling across the South Street Bridge back to our apartment when we passed a group of guys going the other way on the bridge. After we had passed, one of them made an observation about our inebriation that Kristine didn’t appreciate and so she turned, arms akimbo, and yelled, “Just because we’re drunk, doesn’t mean we’re deaf.”
I share this story not because I was recently drinking at my office, rendering myself deaf, but because I think it is a widely accepted misconception that when you can’t see someone they can’t hear you.
See, I was sitting at my desk; we’ll say I was working, and from my peripheral vision I saw one of the partners I work for pass by my office. Next, I heard him in the office of the partner with whom I share a wall.
“Did you see this crap?”
I stopped typing so I could hear better.
There was a pause, then an affirmative.
“Can you believe it? What am I supposed to do with this?”
He then launched into a diatribe about the uselessness of some document and I was so excited, anticipating the moment when he would reveal what idiot had wasted his time with such nonsense. That is, until it became clear that the idiot was me and the document I imagined he was waving around his head was something I had prepared for him earlier in the week.
“It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I don’t disagree with you.”
I wanted to scream, “What part?” or “What does that even mean – I don’t disagree with you?” But mostly I wanted to shout through the wall, “I can hear you.”
Instead, I just sat there, trying to block out all his nonspecific criticisms of something that I was quite proud of, all the while wondering just how I could possible hand in something more to his liking the next time when I had no knowledge of what exactly had offended him so greatly. How is anyone supposed to learn this way?
Then it occurred to me that screaming at his partner that just so happens to sit next to me might be his passive aggressive way of letting me know I have to do a better job next time.
So now I have decided to teach him a lesson about passive aggression and am going to just pretend I have no idea he was talking about my work. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Barely Legal offers humorous monthly musings on what it's really like to work for a law firm. Hint: It's nothing like it is on TV.
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