“Are you angry with me this morning”?
I looked up from what I was doing on the system. “Angry? No, why should I be?”
The department data analyst is still looking at me. “You have somewhere been quiet since I entered this this office, greeted you twice, no response." He said that in our local dialect.
I was so surprised by what he said because I honestly had not noticed. I was sitting in the H.O.D. office with the AC and the OX fan blowing everywhere, and somewhere not far from the surroundings was the big departmental generator humming loudly. I had been staring at some of the works I needed to go through before the H.O.D. submitted them to the school faculty, and that has been going on for some hours, and I'm still trying to make everything more perfect. My head was somewhere else entirely.
But from his observation and his conclusion, my silence looked personal.
I told him later what I had been going through since I got to the office and had to apologize for my responding to him. He smiled and said, "So you have been carried away in the spirit because of work. I thought I did something."
I was a bit embarrassed. Not because he did not understand me, but because I got to know how easily I had given him to come up with a whole story around a quiet person who was a bit carried away with work.
And to be honest, it was strange that I couldn't blame him. Because I once did something similar in the past. Someone avoids eye contact, sends a short response, or just goes quiet, and my mind starts coming up with the unnecessary missing puzzle. Maybe they are proud, and upset. Maybe I have done something wrong, maybe they don't want to see me here.
I can say that we barely have all the facts about anyone we come across. Most times, it is only what they did that appears in front of us, and without knowing, our minds usually come up with the rest of the answers.
In the office after what happened had happened, I was so conscious of my silence in a careful way. Not because if I go silent it is bad or not allowed, but because I finally got to see how someone else may give it another explanation or tag it as something else.
And in most cases, before I stand to defend myself against any assumption, it helps to ask what made the assumption seem reasonable in the first place.
Thank you for reading.
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