I visited my daughter at her college this weekend and one of the activities we attended was a recital of her voice teacher Dr Margaret Hanegraaf. Her teacher and accompanist were performing a series of short operatic pieces predominantly written in Spanish. Dr Hanegraaf has a beautiful full operatic Soprano voice and the songs were very well performed. Now I personally am not an opera fan and I had been up to between 2-3 AM trying to stay up with a college sophomore so I was very tired. In my effort to stay focused I pulled out the translation of the very dramatic piece I was hearing. The translation went something like:

This was a beautiful piece of cloth but now it has a spot on it.

Are you kidding? I was listening to a song about laundry. I set aside the translation sheet because I decided that giggling might be considered rude. Of course when one of the later songs was very sad I could only think “wow, she really liked that cloth”. When another song became fierce I was convinced “she is really mad that someone sold her cloth with a spot”.

I was reminded by this experience that perhaps we sometimes put more effort into promoting a message than the message deserves. Perhaps when you get a spot on your clothes a short note to your dry cleaner would be a more appropriate mechanism for communicating your displeasure than an opera. I wonder what sort of an opus would have been created if the waiter forgot to serve the salad dressing on the side.

I think as companies or individuals we should evaluate the message we have before we determine the means of communication. Sometimes when people are not responding it is not the communication mechanism that is the problem.

As a footnote i thought is somehow cruel that one of only three pieces in English was a lullaby. Now that’s just mean.