Chatting
A while ago the company held an event requiring every employee to go out on the streets to find target customers, give them a small gift, and then get their phone numbers. I’ve always hated this kind of marketing method, but I never expected to become one of the participants in this event. However, I’m not a sales employee. I’ve never received language training. During the script practice, I was always stuttering. So Boss Cao specifically asked Wenwen from HR to give language training to me and another colleague who does network maintenance. She wanted the two of us to read text aloud in the company for half an hour. She believed that after a month of training, we would be able to speak smoothly.
Although sometimes I tend to use wrong words and pause when speaking, I’ve never believed that I stutter or am timid. Sometimes my brain is in a suspended state, but my mouth keeps working. That’s exactly why I easily use wrong words, and then pauses appear. But when my brain recovers function, when I’m interested in the conversation content and it’s exactly my area of expertise, I won’t stutter. For example, when two or three friends sit together chatting, thoughts diverging freely—at those times I can have clear thinking, speak freely and eloquently, feeling unprecedented ease and pleasure.
My favorite way of chatting is sitting in a rattan chair in a teahouse or coffee shop, in a fair and leisurely posture, slowly opening up heart-to-heart amid the rising mist from fragrant tea or coffee. What I hate most is chatting at dinner parties. When everyone is in high spirits, such chatting is mostly based on joking around—extremely casual and useless. It’s like in ancient times using sword dancing to liven things up, and now using bragging to aid digestion. For this very reason, when my friends are pointing out the world at dinner parties, I’m secretly wolfing down food. By the time they’ve only said five-tenths of what they want to say, my stomach is already very bloated and painful.
Today Tingting, Axin, Axin’s male friend, and I were chatting in the music park. This friend asked the three of us why we always talk about life when chatting. I didn’t know how to answer him. Indeed, each of us lives our own life. There’s no connection in work, no common ground in professional knowledge. Besides talking about life, entertainment, and ideals, I don’t know what else we can talk about. Among the classmates and friends I’ve met, the people who love chatting the most are definitely those selling insurance. Their eloquence makes me look up to them with endless admiration like the flowing Yangtze River: they can first talk about all kinds of sparkling experiences in their work. Two hours later they’ll talk about all kinds of awesome stories they heard from chatting with others last time. Two more hours and they’ll talk about their own pain and ambitions. The final closing line is always: “Bro, when you make it big, don’t forget your brother!” All of the above content is secondary. The key is that this speech of theirs must be produced at a dinner table where everyone maintains strange and tired postures. Whenever I encounter this kind of chatting, I can’t help but feel an urgent need to urinate.
Chatting, so to speak, is communication. Chatting where thoughts are exchanged and souls mutually inspire can score a full ten points. Chatting that only reports one’s own situation and leaves both parties feeling bored can probably only score one point.