John Linton .......based on a strange 'conversation' I had last night I am beginning to wonder about that ....or something far more important.
Sometimes it seems you just can't win no matter how hard you try. I have always tried to be a plain spoken person having being brought up and educated to be that way and being continually puzzled all my business life by people who used obfuscation as a principal method of communication in both verbal and written forms.....which means I should not be as surprised as I am by being continually confronted by people who communicate in ways that I simply don't understand what they mean or even what it is they want. Then, lately, I am more inclined to believe that I have lost the capability of spelling out what I mean, assuming that there was a time when I had that capacity, as so many people I speak to don't seem to understand what I'm saying.
I conducted an email 'conversation' with a possible new supplier last night who certainly got my attention by sending me an 'offer' to provide IP transit at a price that was around 50% less than the offer we are currently considering accepting. Not only was the current price being offered far lower than any other I have seen to date the 'offer' implied that pricing would fall 25% each year providing a minimum annual spend was maintained. Really exciting offer that would make our future plans for business services much easier to provide. However after exchanging six emails over a two hour period I remain completely unclear as to what 'he' (I use the inverted commas as the writer's gender was unclear using names I am not familiar with) is offering and am wondering why what I thought were simple questions on my behalf seemed to be so confusing to 'him' that I still don't know on what basis the service is to be provided. It apparently is not as simple as our usual buyer/seller relationship where we offer to buy n gbps for $n per gbps per month delivered to x POI via y gbps interconnect....if it was I would think we would be buying from a new supplier in the very near future.
Having watched "Yes, Minister" many decades ago and then seeing that fiction is actually fact when it comes to Labour government ministers and, to a lesser extent, Coalition government ministers I am familiar with the deliberate obfuscatory technique of answering any question by simply repeating a previous statement unrelated to the question or asking a different question instead of providing an answer. It is so standard in political life now, Ms Faustus uses it 100% of the time, that a sensible person never expects any political question to be answered - but I have never encountered it to that extent in business life nor have I ever seen it in written 'dialogue'. I always use the crude method of numbering my questions so there can be no misunderstanding and replying to even dense blocks of text by splitting it up with my own numbering and then framing the reply using answers corresponding to that numbering.
Even allowing for English obviously not being the first language of my correspondent I don't think that we managed to progress my understanding of what was being offered and I'm certain 'he' was no more enlightened than I was as to whether we could accept what 'he' was offering after the email exchanges than before he sent me the first indication that we might be able to do business. While last night's baffling incomprehension may be an extreme example it does raise the issue, at least for me, as to whether it is past the time that I should involve myself in 'negotiations'. It isn't the first time that I have decided that I just wasn't able to express Exetel's requirements in ways that were being understood by the people, both inside and outside Exetel, to whom I was attempting to convey a clear 'message'.
I'm not sure how to address this, unbelievably important, issue.
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