You embarrass me. You’re overestimating me. Listen, I’m not a man with any special skill, but I’ve had plenty of experience in battles; losing battles, all of them. In short, that’s all I am.
— Seven Samurai (1954)
Wonderful film. Every scene is an intellectual and aesthetic joy. What a lot of beauty Kirosawa has left us.
While it’s true that a lot of telemarketers are just folks trying to make ends meet, you still shouldn’t feel bad about hanging up on them in mid-sentence.
Many telemarketers aren’t actually allowed to end a call without making a sale; if they did so voluntarily, they’d be fired. By corporate edict, that call was only ever going to end in one of two ways: with you buying something, or with you hanging up on them. There’s no point trying to end the conversation politely because the script they’re working off of demands that they ignore and obstruct any attempt to do so – and they will be punished for failing to follow it.
You hanging up on them is literally the only way for them to get out of a call that’s not going anywhere, so you might as well get it over with. You’re actually doing them a favour.
Yes.
This is also an instance of a more general principle: notice when people are weaponizing social norms, and react by refusing to play the game.
Easy mode for this is the people on the street with pamphlets. They’ll weaponize social norms in an attempt to make you stop and talk to them. One script I see, for instance:
ACTIVIST: Hi! Excuse me, are you a student here?
PASSER-BY: –yes, I am.
ACTIVIST: Do you care about the ethical treatment of minorities on campus?
PASSER-BY: ….um, yes, but…
ACTIVIST: Were you aware that 90% of statistics about minorities are made up on the spot to serve as examples in tumblr posts?
PASSER-BY: …no, I wasn’t, but I really have to…
ACTIVIST: Here’s what our organization does to fight that!
…and so forth.
The trick here, of course, is that the first question is one which it’s socially unacceptable to avoid answering. If the activist opens with “would you like to help save a photogenic animal today?” you can say “no thank you.” If they open with “do you care about the whales?” you can grit your teeth and say “nope.”
But how do you respond to “are you a student here”? It’s a yes or no question, to which you definitely know the answer, so you can’t mumble something about not knowing. And it’s not explicitly related to their cause, so you can’t just automatically say “not today thanks.” (If you try either of those, they’ll call you on it – “what, you’re not a student today?”)
Ignoring them, or saying “that’s none of your business” or “leave me alone,” is a violation of social norms, and means you look like a jerk, because they asked a question that’s well within the realm of what’s socially permissible. So if you’re playing by social norms, you have to answer.
And then, once you’ve answered, you’re engaged in conversation with them. It’s an egregious violation of social norms to walk away from a conversation without going through the normal conversation-ending procedures. And they of course will not participate in those. So now you’re trapped, where you would have been free under social norms to walk past someone shouting at you about statistics if you hadn’t yet engaged with them.
The only way to escape these situations is to notice them and step outside the social game. This is hard; you will get intensethis-is-awkward, I-am-being-awful-and-mean feedback from your brain, which has noticed you are violating the rules and would like you to stop. But walking away without saying anything, or saying “I don’t want to talk right now,” is in fact the correct thing to do here.
And that’s easy mode. People selling something play this game blatantly. Hard mode is people who play it expertly, within society, so that you have to go along with what they want or be forced into violating social norms. (And people will go along with a lot rather than violate social norms.) Friends who ask you for things in a way that makes it awkward to refuse. Family members who treat you badly but do it in a way contrived so that any complaint will constitute you being rude. In the really extreme cases, the same dynamic shows up in abusive relationships. It’s the adult version of an abuser convincing a kid he’ll get in trouble if he tells his parents.
So this is, IMO, a really important skill to learn and to deploy properly. Social norms are great, I love doing the dance of social convention, it’s lovely and satisfying, but if your partner keeps trying to stab you with a poisoned dagger, maybe it’s time to stop dancing. Even if that looks weird in the middle of the dance floor.
This is something I never thought needed to be broken down before, but once you did it helped make a lot of things clear. Like, I already knew that sales people are pushy and try to rope you into conversations that are difficult to terminate, but describing the reasons why those conversations feel so awkward to leave abruptly was super enlightening.
My favorite social norm to break is when some stranger on the street tries to initiate a conversation by shaking your hand because not leaving a handshake hanging is so ingrained. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a manipulative stranger holding out their hand waiting for a shake to establish false intimacy and then slowly lower it back down, defeated.
Alternatively my second favorite is rebuffing street prosthelytizers asking “are you a Christian?” by not slowing down and saying “i don’t know.” Counter something “impossible” to get away from with something impossible to *respond to*
And this can have far more impact than just being able to get away from pushy salesmen. Criminals looking for victims to prey on use the same techniques to see who’s an easy target
Back when I was in college on campus I was asked if I believe in god by someone who was trying to get people to go to something I think. And I told him “ehhh sometimes depends on the day” and he said well what about today? And I was like nope not today and kept walking lmao
Brighton, where I used to live, was some sort of breeding ground for Chuggers (the people who try to talk to you on the street). I was pretty adept at avoidance. Then one day a guy grabbed my hand and shook it. Literally GRABBED me hand. I was not happy.
I tightened my grip on his hand. I’m a steelworker. I have a strong grip.
I did not stop walking at the same pace I’d been going before he grabbed me. He had to twist around so he wasn’t walking backwards.
He began to attempt his patter on me. I didn’t respond, just kept walking.
After about 30 seconds he stopped trying to talk me into signing up to whatever charity. He said, in a completely different voice. “Are you going to let go of me?”
I just shrugged and said “You started it.”
I kept walking.
Then he said “What are you going to do to me?”
I said “Put you in the basement, with the others.”
He said “Please let go of me?”
So I said “Promise to never grab anyone’s hand like that ever again, and I will.”
He promised. I released him. We were about half a mile from where he started.
I didn’t see him again.
Woo Elfbert! (I also like the “some days I believe, but not today, thank you” line)
It was written in 1999, when I was a passionate fan, and when I still wrote apostrophes instead of the last <g> in words ending in “ng”, to mark that the velar nasal transcribed as /ng/ is usually pronounced as a nasal /n/ by characters in Westerns (stops showing off her former training).
Thanks to Elfbert and Stephantom, for encouragements.
This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.
Depictions of the “Massacre of the Innocents”, as ordered by King Herod.
This is great – comparing-and-contrasting paintings on the same theme, so we can reblog and look at light, perspective and all the things we should have learned in high school about Looking At Paintings.. Please keep on doing it.
Favor: In the first place, how could you ever find a ramrod as good as yourself?
Rowdy: That wouldbe hard. Listening to you talk, I’ll probably find a better one.
I “hear you”, but I am not so sure about the pain. I see lots of good(ish) emotions there.
1. F recommends R to the owner of the second herd, and R is grudgingly pleased
2. R chooses as ramrod someone very much like himself, or maybe his slightly younger self, and develops a good relationship with him (including the punch-up, which ends in a draw)
3. The tension when R’s herd overtakes F’s is, imo, exciting rather than painful: R’s smile of challenge, F’s tight-lipped acceptance. I can see no abuse or bad feelings other than testosterone-fuelled competition.
4. The anxious look on F’s face when he finds out that R has chosen the riskier options: oh, those emotions battling in his face,the wish that R may lose the race fighting it out with protective anxiety (and imo the latter wins)
5. The ending is obviously a badly-written patch-up job (R couldn’t possibly become a trail boss and leave the series!!), but oh, F’s look of despair and R’s confusion when it looks as if R might leave for good.
Twenty or so years ago I wrote a very explicit (by my standards) coda to this episode. A couple of you may have seen it. I am not sure I would write it again, but if anyone is interested I’ll put it on AO3, pointing out that it was written by a younger-and-unwiser-self.
mici's campfire 