Only slightly bent

Ever notice how some people often ask rhetorical questions that shouldn’t really be? In other words, they ask a question and then don’t either wait for an answer or care about the answer even when they should. In the English-speaking world, the ubiquitous “How are you?” and subsequent indefference to the anwser is normal behaviour, so nobody pays attention to it – it’s like an automatic handshake protocol for people. But all such questions are not so harmless.

“Am I calling you at a bad time?” sounds innocent enough. When the answer hints of “yes, can you call back later?“, the situation should be clear and the call should be over. But no – instead, some people continue with their business, at most saying “well I’ll make it really quick then” and then go on explaining their business. WTF is that supposed to mean? How were they going to put it in the first place then? Agonizingly slowly? (Yes it’s arguable whether one should answer the phone at all if it’s a bad time, but you can’t always avoid it because it might be an emergency.)

Similar automatic questions happen at many stores – if you given them a card and say “debit, please” (or credit), approximately 3 seconds later the cashier will ask “Debit or credit?” Hello? Did I not just answer that? Or, when given a credit-only card, they will also ask “Debit or credit” – the smarter ones will notice the error soon and follow up with a “Oh it’s only a credit-card” but many will still ask “Debit or credit?”. When this happens, I always really want to answer “debit, please” when giving a credit-only card. But that would probably be annoying

Similar things happen also in more subtle ways; for example, some people are just very egocentric. These people only want to tell – and often exaggerate – how they are doing, what’s been happening to them and how they are under this or that distress or 7th heaven. They usually have learned that it’s polite to ask how the other person is doing and listen politely for a while – and only then start talking about yourself. The problem (or the beauty, depending on your point of view) with this tactic is that it’s usually remarkably easy to tell whether someone is not really listening but just humoring you.

Virpi Hämeen-Anttila’s Suden Vuosi (literally the Year of the Wolf, but AFAIK it hasn’t been translated) was this summer’s first fictional book that I read; my wife accidently picked it up from the library and recommended it to me after reading it herself. And to my big surprise, it was a really good book! It’s probably been years since I read a Finnish fictional novel and this experience showed that I may have to read some more often.

The story is about a handful of persons in Helsinki, focusing on a student and a university teacher and the somewhat strange relationship that starts to develop between them. Beautifully written with a gripping (albeit potentially predictable) plot, it’s a really strong first book by the author. I especially enjoyed the little bit “artistic” style of writing – I can imagine this would be a nightmare to translate to some other language. A couple excerpts might help understand what I mean:

Sitäkin autaallisempaa on löytää jostain pilkkahinnalla aarre. Silloin hän seisoo kirja tiukasti hyppysissä, kääntelee sivuja hurmion vallassa, kaksikymppiä, ihme, saan tämän, joka on minulle ilo ja nautinto ja taivas, siksi että se ei merkitse kenellekään muulle mitään.
…
He eivät puhu mitään. Kaikki energia suuntautuu muualle, ja sitä paitsi tilanteen vaatimat sanat ovat liian raskaita liikuteltaviksi.

Perfect summer reading, 4 out of 5.

Ever noticed how some people have apparently never heard of of personal hygiene, taking a shower, soap and all that good stuff? I recently encountered one at the workplace cafeteria – of all places! This guy smelled so terrible that you couldn’t even be close to him – it’s like he hadn’t washed himself for weeks. It was really, really gross.

At times you also run into the “lifestyle drunks” in buses or trams – usually they smell of, well, urine and sweat and what-not most of the time. But they’re also usually so wasted and acting generally obnoxious that I don’t have any problem in telling them off.

But if an otherwise smart-looking and acting person smells terrible, what can you say? “Excuse me sir, but did you know that you stink to high heaven?” Somehow I don’t think that would necessarily be received very well. Maybe “I’m not sure if you’re aware of it, but there’s a slight odor emanating from you – perhaps you’ve worn the same shirt a few wee.. umm, days too long?” Not sure if that’s any better. But really, someone’s gotta say something sooner or later – torturing your co-workers or citizens in general by smelling like carcasses is cruel and unusual punishment.

Another kind of smell is also problematic – that of people trying too hard to avoid smelling bad. It seems some women in particular feel they have pour a bottle of perfume on them, thus creating a stench that you can smell from ten meters away. A strong, choking, pungent smell of perfume isn’t much better than overdone “natural” odors.

Okay, so sure, not showering for a week or two or a month may fly in some other cultures, but not in “western” ones! While pens with anti-bacterial coating is definately taking it too far, I don’t think basic hygiene is too much to ask. But really, what can you tell these people?

The latest issue of Harvard Business Review had one interesting, albeit a little light article titled “Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools and the formation of Social Networks” by Tiziana Casciaro and Miguel Sousa Lobo. It’s about how we choose those who we work with and the fact that some people just are jerks and some lovable regardless of their knowledge level. They utilize a basic two-by-two table with “competence” and “likability” as the variables, creating four basic types: competent jerks, incompetent jerks, lovable stars and lovable fools.

The two problem types are obviously the competent jerks – who basically know their stuff but are socially very, umm, challenged – and the lovable fools who are wonderful people but don’t really know all that much. The two other types are relatively straightforward to deal with. One you fire, one you hold on to really tight.

Anyhow, it turns out people would rather work with incompetent but nice co-workers instead of jerks who are competent. No huge surprise there, IMHO; as someone being a total jerk can easily wipe out any benefit of his or her competence, why would people even bother to work with them in the first place? What I did find surprising was that so many people in their data said they would rather choose the “competent jerk” over the “lovable fool” – and then actually did the opposite. It’s hypothesized that maybe people wanted to appear more professional by not letting personal traits influence their decision of choosing co-workers – very possible, but also rather de-humanizing. You simply cannot get around the fact that too much social tension (which the jerks bring in more than warranted) is disastrous for any work. The problems of working with the jerks are also brought up in the article:

But there are justifiable reasons to avoid the jerk. Sometimes it can be difficult to pry the needed information from him simply because he is a jerk. And knowledge often requires explanation to be useful – you might, for instance, want to brainstorm with someone or ask follow-up questions – and this kind of interaction may be difficult with a competent jerk.

While the authors propose incentives as one way of getting the jerks to co-operate better, I think it’s universally agreed that it is usually much easier to train a willing person the required skills and knowledge than to change the behaviour of an unwilling person. That should really be a no-brainer really. So instead of focusing on how to get the jerks act more normal, I think more weight should be put to training the nice people so that they could become “lovable stars”. Or at least focus on the real behavioural issues rather than trying to just mask them by incentives; it’s remarkably easy to tell when someone is faking it. While the article also does point out that the likable should be leveraged, it does not really concentrate on training their know-how but instead talks about utilizing them mainly as social catalysts.

I’m not saying behavioural modification for the jerks is a bad goal as such – I’m just saying that it’s probably easier to move people from the “lovable fool”-quadrant to the “lovable star”-quadrant than to move them there from the “competent jerk”-area. And the ideas of moving the incurable jerks to positions where they have limited social contact may be a good thing, too. Some people like to work alone whereas some need social contact – in my subjective opiniong, it’s often the jerks who prefer to work alone and often the liked people are social by nature in the first place.

The Finnish summer is great. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s not necessarily great in absolute terms, but subjectively thinking it’s awesome – because of the crappy other seasons. Anyhow, that is not the point now. The point is that when it’s sunny and warm, you feel compelled to spend the day outside. Forced, in fact. You have to get a cold drink, maybe a good book and soak up some sun. And it’s great. It’s practically a sin to stay inside on a beautiful day – it’s a sin because the perfect days are few and far between.

But when we’re blessed with a longer stretch of good weather, the neglected things become more obvious: dishes and laundry start piling up, the house needs some cleaning, all the things you need to do inside never get done. So when you are eventually forced to do that – stay inside on a beautiful day – oh the agony! It’s this inexplicable feeling of doing something wrong, of wasting the summer day. But heck, there’s all winter time to do all those chores and stuff. Who cares if you don’t have time to clean your place for three months, it’s worth it – and you’re outside anyway, it’s not like you’ll have much time to notice the mess Dishes and laundry may, however, require some more frequent attention.

This is not the case elsewhere on the planet. When you live somewhere that has constantly good weather, you slowly become accustomed to it – and no longer does it feel bad to stay inside on a perfect day because you know tomorrow will be perfect also. And the day after that. And so on. Here in Finland, there’s no such certainty. For all we know, today can be the last day of the summer and therefore it must be enjoyed. I much prefer the guarantee of constantly good weather instead of this frenzy that lasts for a few short months and then it’s back to hibernation.

Then we have the newspapers, instigating discontent in all seasons: if there is one week of +25C days, the local tabloids start conducting polls whether people would like for the summer to end or it to rain or some bullshit like that. And some people always say yes. Same thing after a week of winter: “would you like it to be summer already?” I don’t get it. Do they have to seek discontent in all seasons?

And one more thing relating to Finland and summers: in Finland it’s never dark and warm at the same time. When it’s dark, it’s usually freezing. That’s why sunsets at 6 or 7pm and continued warm evenings feel so exotic when you’re travelling somewhere south.

Sometimes it seems that some industry is constantly on strike in Finland. The talk for the past few weeks has been centered on the paper industry (who, btw, are already being paid way more than other industrial workers) and the frontier guards. The paper industry has been on strike or lockout for weeks now.

I don’t know much about the frontier guards-case but one can hardly avoid hearing about the paper industry mess. My subjective opinion is that the workers are demanding too much under the circumstances. But in any case, the relative demands and the identity of the “guilty” party don’t really matter; whoever is to blame, the effects on the industry are the same: everybody suffers.

Everybody in the paper industry, that is. The rest of us are doing quite okay, thanks for asking: the much-hyped shortage of paper (particularly toilet paper) never materialized as importing the paper from abroad has solved that problem. And this is where the real danger lies – it turned out that Finland is, in fact, not the only country in the world producing paper. In addition, importing the required paper from other countries has not proved to be substantially more expensive than the local variety. Given this, I wonder how many companies are going to switch to using foreign paper as the primary source? After all, if their delivery is more reliable and prices competitive, why wouldn’t they?

Basically I think the industry is just begging for even more trouble than they’re already in. It’s like watching kids argue in a sandbox.