Today has been another Trouble With Communication Day(TM). I will ask an either/or question and get back “yes.” Or a detailed question and the answer, while related, seems to be answering a different question or is so vague it provides no usable answer and can confuse things even more.

I get a strong feeling that the other person has missed my point, so I try again to explain what I am looking for. The formula is I repeat my question, they repeat their answer. No movement is accomplished on either side. If I am unlucky, I can’t think of another way of stating my question that is any more clear than the original so I am stuck repeating it verbatim. I don’t understand what the other person is missing from my explanation, what they think they are answering, so I don’t know what to add or what to leave out.

I want to jump up and down and wave “I’m over here, stop looking to my right!” I am sure they think they understand and they wonder why I am not getting their point.

I think the problem is with the basic foundation of the question and answer. The shared information we are trying to work from. I am talking oranges, they are talking apples. Twisting the stem off and using a knife to peel it near the surface makes complete sense to them and is completely irrelevant to me. Once peeled, putting your thumbs down the center makes sense to me and is very strange to them.

When we check in with each other to be sure we are talking about the same thing. “Fruit-yes, Round?-yes, Common?-yes. Guess we are talking about the same thing. That means you must be a freak.” Once we figure out that these are apples and oranges we are discussing, everything we each have said makes sense. We now know how to ask for the info we need and how to interpret what the other is talking about. We can distinguish between useful info (grows on trees works for both) and the immaterial info (mostly in Florida/mostly in Washington). Don’t even ask me what happens when someone has a banana.

I don’t know if Mercury being in retrograde really has this affect but on days where this happens a lot, it seems we have lost the ability to remember the name of our fruit and frustrating misunderstandings incur. Using the concept of apples and oranges, you can notice the affect and try to figure out what is the missing premise that is different between you (the names of your fruit) or just agree it seems that you each have different fruit and give up without getting upset at each other.