You Better Keep Your Sanity

A simple communication process I learned in college has the following components:

1 sender

1 receiver

Message or Response

Between them is the channel from which the message and response flows. It could be a telephone, the email, or even a radio. In the olden times it’s the air between them, example is Person A shouting to Person B. Reverse it freely if you wish.

A simple representation could be this:

Person A ß———– message/response ———-à Person B

This is a very straightforward representation of a simple communication process. Even a college imbecile will understand this.

Now

Suppose Person A sends a message or instruction to Person B. Person B replied affirmatively, meaning he concurs positively with the instructions. Person B then executes the instruction coming from Person A.

This is the instruction:

Paint all green eggs in all Baskets to red and tag them with individual numbers

Person A checked the end result of the whole instruction. What Person B did was to paint it all in red without tagging them with individual numbers. Person A then received a complaint stating that some red eggs have no numbers. Person A then told Person B that they need to tag it all with individual numbers. Person B then concurs that all is well and it has been all tagged properly.

Case solved.

After a few days more complaints were received of similar nature. Person A then asks Person B why this happened. Person B then responded that there were green eggs lost from Basket 1 and were placed in Basket 2. Person A asked Person B to repeat the procedure for Basket 2 the way they handled Basket 1. And to be doubly sure, he asked Person B if there are more green eggs in other Baskets. Person B replied there were none.

Person A is now satisfied that all green eggs are now painted red and tagged properly with individual numbers.

However more complaints came. Reports received were there were a lot of red eggs without numbers!

Person A then asked why this happened? The instructions were very clear, Person B just needs to paint all green eggs in all the Baskets with red paint and tag them afterwards with individual numbers. Person B then replied that there were really few small green eggs compared to a majority of green eggs and he’s uncertain if these small green eggs will be painted red too.

At this point Big Boss investigated the whole incident. He asked Person A what happened and Person A then replied that he instructed Person B to just paint all green eggs in all the Baskets to red, then tag them with individual numbers.

Big Boss scratches his head. “You should have instructed Person B to paint the small green eggs from the beginning!” he says.

“’But Big Boss’ Person A explained, ‘ I specifically told him to paint all green eggs to red!’”

“Well maybe you should have had asked if he eats sausage for breakfast everyday before handing him the instructions…” says Big Boss.

(At this point Person A slashes his wrists…)