Random gender communication point

[Farmgirl]

Okay -- disclaimer -- points made here are general for the largest part of society and do not apply to all equally (want to say that before someone jumps in to disagree with me and say "but I'm not like that!")


After seven years of working helpdesk, I had come to realize there are some basic general differences between the way men and women view and communicate a problem.  This little light bulb went on in my head after an incident yesterday.


As a general rule, when women call the helpdesk, they give way more information than is needed in order to solve a problem (or determine the problem) or totally irrelevant information.  This makes it my task to sort through everything they just said and pick out what parts I need and what parts I don't have:

"Hi, this is Cathy from loans on 6th floor. Well, I used to be on 3rd floor, credit, but now they've moved me up to 6th floor.  But things had been working okay since I got up here, but then I went away for two weeks of vacation (did I tell you I went to Cancun?) and I got back yesterday and things all seemed to be generally okay except for that printer issue that I called Eric about yesterday, but now today I can't get in and I know I'm using the right password."

(Problem: she had locked herself out of network -- however she never exactly SAID which password was having a problem, so I still have to determine which system she was trying to enter a password into).

as opposed to male caller:

"Yo.  I don't know the signon."

(Problem:  He's unable to get into something. At this point I don't know 1) who he is, or where he is  2) what system he is trying to get into, or 3) if it is the username or the password he has an issue with.)


These thoughts are all a culmination from an incident that happened yesterday on my way home.
I stopped at my local convenience store for a coffee (a daily thing).  I was in line behind some guy who had just come in the door, walked up to the clerk and demanded simply:  "What CODE"?

I have never seen a more blank look on someone's face than that clerk had. She just stared at him. Finally she said, "What?"
He said, "What code?  I'm trying to get a car wash. WHAT CODE???"
Blank look from clerk.

Being that I'm used to speaking male confusion, I jumped in and said, "did you pay for the car wash inside here, or at the pump?"  He said, "When I got gas" (meaning, at the pump).  I said, "Did you get a receipt?" and he said "yes" so I said, "On your receipt, there should be a line that says "Wash Code" and is a five-digit number. That is the number you punch in over there at the wash."
He said, "Okay, that's all I wanted to know!" and glared at the clerk for not understanding his original question.  She glared at me.

Oh well.

[Annie Subjunctive]

Fortunate that you were there to translate!

[Noemon]

I deal with a lot of IT customers too, and while I don't get (from either gender) a lot of the sort of superfluous information* that you get from women, I do find that men are less likely to identify themselves, just jumping into either "I can't get into the system" (or more often "the system's down", which it virtually never is.  I'm pretty good at extracting the information I need from them, though.

The thing that I'm always entertained by is how confident users always are that the problem they're experiencing is being caused by something completely unrelated to their problem (ever since you integrated my new PKI cert into my account I haven't been able to get to database X, for example. They'll claim that they got into database X on a daily basis prior to the cert integration, and that now they're not able to.  Looking in the logs usually shows that they haven't actually tried to access that database once in the past 90 days, and the link that they're trying to follow to a particular document in the database points to one that had to be deleted or something).

[Jonathon]

I think there is some truth to that, Farmgirl, even though I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions. There's a linguist named Deborah Tannen who has done a lot of research on gender issues in communication, and her theory is that men are generally more concerned about hierarchical relationships (whether they have more or less power than the person they're talking to) while women focus more on how close they are to someone (whether they're a good friend, acquaintance, stranger, enemy, whatever).

So maybe men give such terse responses because having to explain everything to a stranger feels like putting yourself in a slightly inferior position. Women, on the other hand, might care more about being understood, so they err on the side of giving too much information. Of course, these are matters of degree and not hard-and-fast rules.

[Farmgirl]

When I was thinking it, I was realizing it could make for a quite hilarious stand-up comic routine.  If I were a stand-up comic, that is.

[Farmgirl]

and Jake -- yes, I get a LOT of that, as well!  We have been deploying new computers throughout the bank, all departments and branches, and lately almost every caller starts out saying, "Ever since I got my new computer...."  (even though rarely it has anything at all to do with the fact their computer is new and/or different.
 

[pooka]

You may get less of that because you're a guy, Noemon.  

[The Genuine]

That's a great post, Farmgirl.