Live From The Field

Everyday I encounter either live and in person or through radio/Internet/TV people in the act of being rude.  Now I don’t mean the ‘rude’ people like to say someone is being when they are doing something you don’t like.  That just usually follows some stupid thing that someone else did that caused the ‘rude’ thing to occur.

Rude encompasses a lot of behaviors but the type of rude I mean is when one person is speaking to another and the listener jumps in halfway to comment or finish the person’s thought even when the thought was not going that direction at all.

One of the nicest things you can do for a speaker is to listen to them all the way to the end of what they were saying – so many people let them start what they are saying and jump right in.  We see it all the time on news programs, talk radio and other television shows – the host asks a question and halfway through the respondents answer the host starts another question without really getting the answer from the first question.  Or on talk TV/radio a panel of people are arguing over one another and no one is really listening to anyone else – just creating a bad symphony noise without really going anywhere.