Speaking in tongues

One ongoing issue between my wife and I is verbal communication. There is often a discordance between the intent of a verbal statement, what is actually verbalized, and what is understood by the speaker.

Here is one example: Yesterday, I came back into my office and found the message light blinking on my phone. I listened to the message. It was about our son's choir concert last night.

This is an accurate transcription of the main part of her message.

..” just want to talk to you about tonight and the possibility of going taking (our son) out (long pause) before he gets home (pause) cause you know think the possibility that things go badly”...

It was not clear to me exactly what she wanted to talk to me about except that it had something to do with our son and his choir concert. I had several possibilities. One was her taking our son out to eat after school before the concert. Another was concern about the weather – the “things going badly” phrase.

I called her back, said that I had listened to her message and paused, expecting her to expand on what she wanted to talk about.

Miscommunication ensued. She was under the impression that she had mentioned going/taking our son out to dinner after the choir concert. However, my initial conversation gambit had to do with trying to figure out what she was talking about - which was NOT about either of the possibilities that I had in mind. Within a minute, it was clear that we were not on the same page, so to speak. Rather than stepping back to figure out what page each of us was on, she immediately went into a diatribe about how my hearing is deteriorating and how this was too difficult...

With some effort, we finally figured out that she and our son had had a conversation about going out to a nice restaurant after the choir performance and this was the intended topic of her phone message. I said this was fine with me, so we went on to talk about the clothes he was going to where and about a friend of his from ice hockey coming over on tonight before ending the conversation.

She was sure that she had mentioned going out to dinner after the choir concert in her message, so afterward we hung up, I played back the message and listened carefully to it and transcribed it as accurately as possible.

Simply because I am very tired of the orthogonal conversations that we tend to have, I emailed her my transcription and pointed out why I was confused as to the meaning of her phone message.

Yes, this is getting too difficult...

(UPDATE 12/30/08 - no response from her about the emailed transcription of the phone message. Not that I seriously thought I would get one - but that is another story).