Showing posts with label #1. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #1. Show all posts

May 1, 2009

Pet Peeve of the Day #1 - Questions

(I'm going to ignore that this is three days late, follow the crowd: you do it, too.)

Questions

Okay, I don't actually hate questions. In fact, I love questions. Questions are very open people, unlike their neighbors, statements. Statements just tell you, they never listen. I do, however, hate when people ask questions and they don't want the answer (a rhetorical question that doesn't come off as a rhetorical question).

"How are you doing?"

"Pretty bad, actually."

"Oh... um..."

See? Most of the time, most people don't want to know [i]how you are doing[/i]. They want you to tell them that they are doing well. Any other response is basically killing the conversation before it truly begins.

This annoys me a lot (hence it being a pet peeve). But as I am not one to give into other's flimsy, faulty, whims (or my own, flimsy, faulty, whims, for that matter.) I don't just tell people what they want to hear "Great, thanks! Yourself?". But I'm not a drama queen, so I don't want to walk around saying I feel terrible. I just stick to a very non-committal "fine." Even when I'm having a good day.

And that's also why I don't typically ask how other people are doing. I know that it's impolite, but if I don't ask you how you're doing, then I really, truly, don't care. (Or I figure, you're talking to me and sound normal, so you must be okay, at least.) So if I don't care about the answer, why waste the breath asking?

So I guess my pet peeve is neither questions nor rhetorical non-rhetorical questions. It's probably when people ask the wrong question.

"Will you tell me you're doing well?"

"Sure."

"How're you?"

"Well, you?"

And all the parenthesis you see in this (or other) posts basically display my internal monologues for all to see. THAT is why I can't make a short blog post. Or a short anything post, really.