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An Outlook: Inadvertently Reinforcing a Male Sterotype

 

At the outset of this confession let me state that I consider myself to be an above average listener. And while I recognize that this assertion is prideful, I do have some supporting evidence.

While in college I took two different writing classes that included course work on listening skills and note taking. And when I was hired to supervise freshmen dormitories I was required to take additional listening training before the semester, and my job, even started.

Finally, there is my age: at the time I conducted my first interview for a story the only option for recording the conversation was reel-to-reel tape and, while I recognize that many of you who are reading this column have no idea what reel-to-reel tape recording is/was, trust me when I tell you that it was completely impractical and unwieldy for documenting most interviews. To this day I still conduct my interviews with careful listening and a note taking system that readily replays the entire interview in my mind when it comes time to write the story.

Whether any of this has convinced you that I am an above average listener or not, the important part of this background is that I was confident in my listening skills. And then, in mid-November, I received the following text from my daughter:

 

Weird question – you know I work at an interior design company, right?

 

And with this one text all my confidence in my listening skills crumbled. You see, the answer to her question is that I did but I also didn’t, and now you will need some background to understand the extent of my blunder.

At the beginning of this past August, about three weeks before she was to be married, my daughter, Molly, was laid off from her job. She had been working in Milwaukee as the personal assistant to the senior architect for a firm that bore his name. During her tenure the company was busy opening several new offices, one of which was in Nashville, and when her boss decided that he would be operating primarily from this new Nashville office, Molly no longer had a job.

She received the news in the morning and went home to tell her fiancé during lunch. On the way back to the office she called me to tell me the news. During the course of this brief conversation she mentioned that, coincidentally, she had received a call from a salon during lunch that was interested in interviewing her to be their front desk manager (I should note that Molly has used head-hunting firms to get almost all her jobs, so the fact that a business called her and wanted to interview her was not, in itself, unusual – only the timing of the call was unusual/coincidental).

In the ensuing days, Molly kept me apprised of her job search. In particular, she told me about the several interviews she had with the interior design company that just happened to share the building that housed the architecture firm she had just been released from. And within 10 days of her first interview, Molly had a new job with the interior design company – working in the same building, with the same short commute. It worked out beautifully and I knew all the details through every step of the process.

Except somewhere along the line these details slipped away from me. The text from Molly, which I quoted above, came to me about an hour after she and I had chatted on the phone. During the course of this phone conversation, Molly was telling me that the interior design company was approaching its yearly goal and, if they successfully billed a number in the six-figure range in the remaining seven weeks of the year, everyone would be entitled to a year-end bonus.

Well, folks, your fearless columnist responded that six-figures seemed like a lot of styling but, if the salon was big enough, I acknowledged that during the holiday season it might be possible. Understand, a large part of me was skeptical that any salon could cut and style that much hair in seven weeks, but my daughter was enthusiastic and I am nothing if not supportive of my children.

I recognize now that there was a pause at the other end of the phone conversation when I ventured my opinion and support, but we moved on to other topics and the conversation ended with the usual “love you” and “miss you” from each of us.

And then, as I said, about an hour after our phone conversation ended I received the now infamous (in my mind) text quoted above. At this point you are probably wondering why in the world I am sharing any of this with you. After all, this is seemingly just something that occurred within my own family and, while I will be teased about this for the remainder of my life by family members, there seems no reason to open myself to ridicule from the community…except I didn’t limit my blunder to my family.

A few weeks before Christmas we were chatting about family plans for the holidays in the Pulse office and I told everyone about how my daughter managed the front desk/operations at a hair salon and even went on to fill everyone in on the possible year-end bonus if they billed six-figures in haircut/styling before the end of the year.

And in recognizing that I compounded my blunder by repeating it in entirety to my co-workers, I suspect that I may well have repeated it with other acquaintances throughout the peninsula.

Thus my confidence in my listening skills has been shaken and may never recover. And even worse, as the title of this column/confession suggests, I have inadvertently reinforced the stereotype that males do not listen to the significant women in their lives. And, folks, I hate being a stereotype!

So, to be clearly and firmly declarative as I end this sordid tale: my daughter, Molly, works for an interior decorating company on Milwaukee’s north side and I – to reiterate from last week’s column – am a major dink.

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