Things People Say Fridays #9 - I Am Wan Ming! Do Not Ignore!

People say the darndest things. Which is why this particular series of blog posts exists. The ramifications of shtuff you hear can reach deeply into your life, you know. More on that soon. Right now, let's meet a couple of friendly, high-spirited young men:

I showed this video to my wife, laughed a little, and decided to do a "Things People Say Fridays" post on it (YOU ARE HERE). That should have been the end of it, but it wasn't. It became kind of stuck in my mind. Later I wrote the new catchy phrase next to a cartoon face one of the kids drew on our whiteboard:

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Next thing I knew I was using it in conversation (at home only, of course) when I felt that I was not being heard. Try it yourself! Say it with me: I am Wan Ming! Do Not Ignore!

Feels good, right? I mean, don't we all need to feel like Wan Ming, the powerful dude with the bigass bamboo stick once in a while? Using the phrase at home was working for me, stopping cross-talk and getting me the attention I required. It might have helped that I was yelling and had perfected the "Wan Ming crazy eyes"...

Anyway, this new phrase and the very temporary but very powerful alter-ego that went with it was working for me, so much so that I tried using it at work in a joking way. People liked it a lot. They snickered and looked sideways at each other and fidgeted around and said stuff like, "you are one super weird dude". It was awesome. None of my jokes had ever worked before.

With the phrase being so successful in all parts of my life excluding the professional, it was only a matter of time before I tried it out in a more formal setting. Have you ever been required to participate in a conference call? For those of you who have not, a conference call often takes the form of a group of people with a conference (fancy speaker) phone talking to other groups or individuals about something they all have a mutual interest in.

original pic source

http://www.flixya.com/photo/904942/Conference-Call-Etiquette

In the many conference calls I have participated in, it is common and almost unavoidable that you feel "talked over" sometimes. This is sometimes because one or more parties on the call are using conventional office half-duplex speaker phones (the fancy conference phones are full duplex*, meaning they can transmit and receive simultaneously) and can't hear your attempts to interject because they are talking at the time. Or, the speaker is just a jerk who won't stop spouting their BS sales jargon, or an egomaniac who can't get enough of her own voice or just a good old rambler who won't shut up. In any case, I was feeling "talked over", and Wan Ming made an appearance.

Of course, everybody else stopped talking. I said what I wanted to say and waited for a response. There was none! It was almost like the other people on the call were sort of stunned and didn't know what to do. I needed to shock them into action and called upon the Grumbear. I figured the combination of the Grumbear and Wan Ming would be impossible to ignore!

I was right, it was impossible to ignore. Sadly, most of the people just took off or hung up and then called my boss. Now I'm in trouble at work. Turns out, my employer doesn't think it is acceptable to take some weird shtuff a kid said, fixate upon it until you create an angry but powerful character in your mind and then try to use it during a business conference call while channeling a construction paper and wool bear who is filled with insane ursine rage. 

I chalk it up to a lack of vision on their part.

R A N T W I C K

* please forgive this little foray into complete nerd land. I couldn't help it. I wish more of us who end up on conference calls understood it. If your workplace has real conference phones, use them and encourage the people you are talking to to use them as well if they can. Huge difference. Much better comm.

PS - Just in case you're new here and are taking me seriously, almost none of the above narrative is true. To see where I crossed from the somewhat true to the completely fictional, find the blue line _______________ above.