These conversations have been brief, but have caused me to wonder about my own relationships. Also each time the other person has been apologetic for contacting me. I have attempted to be friendly and courteous, but their conditioned response is still to apologize.
I don't understand why we feel the need to do that when dialing a wrong number. I do take the time to apologize only if it has been established that the call is unwelcome. Other than that I will usually attempt to converse with the individual,
time permitting. Some of the best conversations I've had were with complete strangers, so why does the general public need to apologize?
Apologizing implies that you've done something wrong. Miss-dialing a number,
while a mistake, is hardly wrong in a moral or ethical perspective. I accept that mistakes happen, but I believe they can be a source of opportunity as well.
When I was working at a gas station my coworker got a text from someone he didn't know. From the area code we knew it was from California, and we had a friend who was traveling with some rappers down there so he responded. It wasn't our friend but a legal clerk who'd had too much wine.
She was a single mom who had just started venturing back into the dating world. Good-looking blonde too, we know this because we managed to get her to send us a picture in the course of the conversation. Quite possibly the best seflie of a woman in a burgundy silk bathrobe I have ever seen. Anyone who thinks they can do better is welcome to try.
Anyway my coworker wasn't sure what to do after we got the picture, and I told him to just be nice to her. Any woman who shows you a pic like that, and isn't getting paid for it, deserves special treatment. So he started talking to her over a couple weeks, and they became fast friends.
Now the story ends there, but I think there's a few important things to point out about it. My coworker was not the best example of a person who treats people decently (the customers called him Mean Gene), but after this started I noticed him soften and start being a little nicer. He also told me he spent a lot of time texting this lady when she got home from the bars. Apparently knowing she could just chat with him let her be more discerning with who she spent her nights with, when she had a sitter.
My point is, if two strangers who have never met before can each benefit from a wrong number, what could the rest of us accomplish if we stop worrying about apologizing for a simple mistake?
Hi Sweetie: I totally agree with you about this. I think the conditioned response for making a mistaken call is because most of us feel we may be intruding on another person's time when it wasn't intended.
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of a great conversation I had with a lady who called me while we lived on Cherry Avenue. We talked for about an hour and a half about lots of things we had in common including friends we knew and various events we had attended. Near the end of the conversation she mentioned someone who had attended a party that I had also been at. When I denied knowing that person she was rather flustered because the three of us had gone to this party together. We both realized at the same time that we were not talking to the people we thought we had been (I thought she was a friend of mine too). We had a good laugh and went our separate ways. Even though it was a wrong number and cases of mistaken identities, we both had spent an enjoyable time together.