Friday, February 18, 2005

"I'm not very good with...confrontation..."

Someone was wrong yesterday.

She doesn't read my blog, but I'm not going to say who it was anyway. Just know that she is someone I interact with on a regular basis, and that her being wrong affected not only herself, but her colleagues and two other groups of people.

In trying to get to the root of the matter, I discovered her fault. But she had been hurt by what had happened, so hurt that she didn't hear what I was saying. I only said it once. Then I backed off.

The whole thing has bothered me on and off ever since. I ended up eating some Chinese food Sean brought home after work (thanks, honey), and then taking a nap until around 9:30. At that point I got up and prepared all my stuff for today, and got online a little, then finally went back to bed. I woke up thinking about it this morning.

I don't know, what do you do when someone you care about is wrong? How do you fix the situation without betraying them? Do you just take their side and not worry about fixing it?

And on a completely different note...what do you do when you come to the point in a debate where you realize the other person isn't going to see things your way, and you aren't going to see things their way? How do you end the debate without making the other person's opinion seem trivial? I've tried saying "It's time to agree to disagree," but that doesn't seem to work.

2 comments:

Josh Centers said...

And on a completely different note...what do you do when you come to the point in a debate where you realize the other person isn't going to see things your way, and you aren't going to see things their way?Well, I don't have the specifics of your situation, but I've been in debates where the other person was either completely misinformed, or just full of shit. And they're completely belligerent about it, to the point that I can bring up a number of references that prove them wrong, but they still won't relent.

Or even worse, they'll start attacking you on something else that has nothing to do with the debate.

For instance:

Me: "Look, according to Wikipedia, C is not a derivitive of BASIC, but rather based on an earlier language called 'B'."

Dumbass: "Well, I have more money than you!"

What do I do? Just shut up. Because at this point, it's not an argument, it's just two monologues. And if it continued, someone would lose an eye.

Heather Meadows said...

LOL :)

In my case, it's two (or more) highly intelligent people who nevertheless simply aren't going to see eye to eye, for whatever reason. It's like we're all coming from completely different frames of reference, so we can't find the common ground needed to understand each other's opinions.