Well, this went on for several sessions. I could tell that he was as frustrated as I was, but I wasn’t getting why. I continued to suspect that he didn’t really want me to teach him, but every time I asked, he said he did.
Finally, I arrived at his office one day to be met by him at the door, not letting me in. He told me that he didn’t need my services anymore. He seemed almost angry, but mostly smug and dismissive. He had told his accounting instructor at the local JC about the situation, he said, and she had come right over and had gotten him set up in half an hour. His words, demeanor, and tone of voice all told me rather accusingly that he was sure I had been deliberately taking far too long just to get more massages.
I looked at him for a long moment. I knew there was nothing I could say. After all, his teacher had done for him what I could have done but what he told me repeatedly that he didn’t want. Either he had been lying consciously all along, or he was in deep denial about the entire situation. In either case, I saw nothing I could say that would be of any use. If I tried to tell him that I had asked him at least a dozen times if that was what he wanted me to do, only to have him say no each time, it would have gone nowhere.
When I was earning my master’s degree in library science (long ago), I had an excellent instructor who had taught us that the questions people come to the reference desk with are not necessarily the questions they want answered. She taught us to dig, to ask questions in turn, to learn to listen in between the lines so we could give people what they really wanted. I have applied this knowledge in many areas in my life, with good to excellent results.
What happened this time? The assumption in the library science class was that people would answer honestly when asked the right question. And that was the assumption I had made in this situation.
The reality is that sometimes people won’t tell you the truth. I am not saying that he was deliberately lying. I am saying, however, that he failed to communicate honestly with me, whether he was aware of it or not. I had been crystal-clear in explaining the difference between my two suggested approaches, not once but many times, and each time he had said he wanted one option when in fact he had wanted the other. Whether it was his pride or his ego or denial or something else, he had chosen not to tell me what he really wanted.
His teacher just did what he wanted, not what he said he wanted. (And maybe he didn’t tell the teacher he wanted to learn how to set things up.) I am sure that he never told his instructor what the real problem was. I am sure his instructor thought, based on his explanation of the situation, that I had been deliberately dragging the thing out, or perhaps was incompetent.
But I had failed in communication too. I had chosen to listen to what his mouth was saying, ignoring what the entire rest of his body language was frantically trying to tell me, which was that he had been trapped by his own initial misrepresentation and had no way to get out of it. All his pacing, irrelevant conversation, and even physically leaving the room, were all screaming at me to give him a graceful way out, but I hadn’t heard it. I saw it, but all I had understood was that maybe he didnt’t really want to learn the program, but more likely it was just hard for him to focus.
Or had I failed? Here lies my dilemma then and now. Should I have ignored his words? I thought I was respecting him by giving his words priority over his body language. But was I? I didn’t want to force on him what I thought he really wanted. That kind of high-handedness can get people into trouble—deciding for others what you think they really want, then forcing it on them. That is the kind of thinking that causes parents to force their children to follow one path when the children really aren’t interested in it or suited for it. That is the kind of thinking that causes people to try to cram their own ideologies or ways of dress or gender preferences or cultural mores etc. etc. etc down the unwilling throats of others.
But in this case, did I do the right thing? Perhaps I could have tried to address the dichotomy between his words and his actions more directly, by saying something along these lines to him: “Can you help me out? I hear you saying that you want me to teach you how to set up your program, but I am getting a different message from your body language.”
I don’t know. Maybe he was too enmired in his position to be able to get out of it in any other way than the way he chose. And maybe that was, after all, the respectful thing to do—let him get out of it in a way that let him save face, even if it left me holding the bag.
