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06/02/08 |
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Are You Mad at Me?A colleague called me up the other day and said, ‘I have sent you a lot of mails and noticed that you haven’t answered any of them in the last week. I’m starting to wonder if you’re mad at me’. Even though she was joking, I told her I wasn’t mad, I had just been extremely busy. Later I remembered the conversation and then realized that I do the same thing! If I haven’t heard from a colleague in awhile, one of the things I think might be wrong is that she might be mad at me for something. I started to wonder…I might think that when a female colleague doesn’t reply to me in awhile, but do I think the same way when it’s a man? Or what do I think then? My thoughts were interrupted when my phone rang. It was a colleague (female) calling to complain: ‘I have tried my best to get Sami to come to a meeting with us! I’ve sent mails, tried to call, everything! But he never answers! The jerk!’ That pretty much answered my question on how we women react when men don’t answer mails. # # I get so interested in this topic of how we react when someone doesn’t answer mails, that I hold a quick survey of friends from work. It’s already Sunday when I start which doesn’t give me much time, so I have to do it through text messages, which I send to 13 friends – 5 male and 8 female. I give them a situation: they’ve sent a lot of mails to a person and the person hasn’t replied for a week. Then I ask them to make 2 guesses as to why they haven’t heard from the person. As their first guess, women thought the person might be busy as much as they thought the person might be mad at them (3 votes by women for each). However, when you put together first and second guesses, then women voted 5 times that the person might be mad at them, making it the most popular reason women gave all-around. Of the men, none thought the person might be mad at them. However, 2 men did have something similar as their second guess. But the way they put it was a bit different than the women. Women said things like ‘I did something to make them mad’. One man said that maybe the other person just happens to hate you, the other said that the other person is probably mean. They don’t seem to blame themselves as much as we women do. However, some men do seem to understand something about the way we women work. When I sent this question about what to do if someone ignores you, one of the men sent me a message back: ‘Is this a theoretical question or are you trying to tell me I’ve done something wrong?’ So what kinds of conclusions do we have from my very systematic and scientific survey? None, I guess. But it was an interesting question to think about.
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