Week 5, Blog #3

The authors’ discussion of mindful and mindless approaches to organizational communication in Chapter 11 reminded of me of an experience I had at work a few years ago. It was early January, and I had just arrived at work. On my way into the office, I ran into a colleague that I worked with occasionally, but not very often. Just to make small talk, I asked her if she had had a good “holiday” (I purposely said “holiday” because our organization had been very specific about respecting others’ religious beliefs (i.e., being politically correct). I also thought that by using this word, it could be construed as New Year’s Day, since that was a holiday that had just past too). Her response was, “I don’t celebrate Christmas”. I realized it wasn’t worth my time to confront the ignorance of her response, so I wound up re-phrasing my question to something like did she have a good time off, just to get past it. I find it rather ironic that trying to be mindful in this mindless or phatic communication scenario didn’t really pay off for me.