Incipient invisibility

Did you know that I have an invisibility cloak?

I don't know where it came from, and I haven't figured out how to control it. I'm never sure when it's actually working, so I haven't gotten too bold with it yet, but I'm getting bolder every day.

It arrived somewhere between my 40th and 50th years, around the same time my hair started to go gray. In that time I've also gotten more tired and gained a few pounds. Happens to everyone, right?

Well, it turns out that the same people who used to make unsolicited comments to me in my younger, thinner years now can't see me at all. I've gone from uncomfortably noticed to uncomfortably overlooked, and I'm not sure which is worse. A trip to Home Depot is an exercise in futility now that I have to practically throw myself at a salesperson (if I can find one) to have a question answered.

It continues at work. Where my job used to put me in the middle of things, now I am occasionally notified when things happen that affect my work, but more often I hear things through the grapevine. I am not consulted about areas of my expertise, and my boss has no idea what I do all day. Nor does he want to know. I am baffled by this.

I feel like I should take advantage of this and just take off for the afternoon to see if anyone notices. Or shoplift, just to see what would happen. I might even be able to pull off a bank robbery.

With my luck, that would be the only time my cloak would fail me.

Dumbing Down

The feedback I keep getting in my job is that I need to communicate better.

I'm told that I explain things too much, that my emails are too long and detailed, that I need to "consider my audience" when I write things.

Here's what I actually do when I write things: I think about what my audience needs to know, I express my opinions, and I back up my opinions with facts and best practices I've learned about from other schools. I learned a long time ago that my opinions will not be taken seriously if I don't back them up with evidence from other places -- it is not enough for me to think something.

I know that I'm not good on my feet. When I go to meetings, I sometimes stutter and over-explain myself. I ask a lot of questions to try to really understand what's being discussed. I know I annoy people when I do those things, but I feel like I'm not doing my job if I don't fully understand something that affects my work. I've seen some technical people gloss over a detail that will affect the non-techies in the room, and I ask questions to clarify. A mixed blessing of this is that I don't get invited to a whole lot of meetings.

So I prefer to write. Emails, memos, documentation -- I can order my thoughts and, most importantly, go back and edit what I say before anyone can see it. I can't do that when I run my mouth. I write out what I'm going to say on my outgoing voicemail message, for crying out loud.

When I write, I try to hew to the middle of a broad spectrum of understanding. I try to back up what I'm saying without getting too far into the weeds, but I also don't want to insult anyone's intelligence by getting too simplistic. We are all adults here, after all. I feel like anyone can extract what they need from my writing and leave the rest, but I don't want to miss anything. The feedback I'm getting, though, is that I'm not making things simple enough. I'm making people read too much.

I'm willing to dumb-down my writing only to a point. For better or for worse, I will continue to demand a certain level of attention to what I have to say, at least from the people who are allegedly my supervisors. If I can't talk about my work in great detail with the people who stand in judgement of my performance, then I don't see how either of us can be effective. Currently, I work for and with people who are not technical, so I have no one with whom I can really talk about my work. This is incredibly isolating and frustrating.

I remember a long time ago, listening to Slate's Culture Gabfest, when they got correspondence from a listener who said they should stop using so many big words. They got a good chuckle out of that, said, "Yeah, that's not happening," and moved on to the next missive. Suddenly I realized that there are workplaces (outside academia) where using big words and explaining things in detail are considered good, perhaps even encouraged.

Unfortunately, despite the Rise of the Nerd, most of the world is still like junior high, where it's not cool to be smart, and no one wants to hear any interesting words. I just can't believe it took me this long to realize that.