Things I’ve learnt from being mute for a week
The real silent treatment. In short, do not recommend
*Apologies for the delay with this one. I’ve had some last minute writing work that I’ve had to prioritise. But if you like my jokes, they’ll be on the television shortly. Unfortunately I can’t post about it, but I guarantee that i’ll blab about it in person*
As you might know by now, I had throat surgery on January 20th. I had to spend the following week completely mute, unless I desired to, going forward, sound like a coffee-bean grinder tackling a tricky selection of pebbles.
Initially, and foolishly in hindsight, I thought this wouldn’t be any bother. All I’ll be doing is writing, gymming, and hanging out with my boyfriend. My life is so hard. None of these require me to use my voice. I don’t write by dictating my dick-jokes, reclining open-robed on a sofa while a grateful scribe catches my spontaneous pontifications with his eagle-eyed pen. Neither do I exercise by screaming through reps, which apparently is the membership requirement for any Gym Group. My boyfriend and I have been together for almost 2 years, and we firmly believed that we were so comfortable and happy just to be in each other’s companies that we could be together in silence, like every middle-aged coupled in a restaurant. At every dinner out, my boyfriend will inevitably crane his neck towards a couple that have spent the entirety of their meals on their phones and say “If that’s ever us, it’s over.”
Honestly, the pauses weren’t just pregnant, they were kicking, turning and causing morning sickness. Nothing gets you talking more than awkward strained silence. Instead of Cartels using noise torture to get the mole to finally blab, they should just employ a bitter partner that refuses to talk. I’m adamant that within 24 hours, not only will the doubled-agent confess, they’d have also offered up all of their childhood transgressions.
Armed with a whiteboard, sharpie and can-do attitude, I thought this was going to be a breeze. In reality, it was a tornado of crossed-wires, tested patience and farcical mishaps. What I envisioned as a well-deserved soothing moment of solace, turned into battle of non-words. It was RnR, if it stood for Rage and Regret.
The first to go was the whiteboard. When you start writing verbatim what you would have otherwise just said, you realise how unnecessarily flabby most of your sentences are. “Good morning, my love. Please may I trouble you for a coffee this morning?” was quickly reduced to “Coffee” and big smile. “I don’t know about you but I’d love some dinner soon, if that suits you?” was reduced to “Food now” and a rubbing of my belly. And “How was work?” was reduced to a simple thumbs up or down and eeek face.
Within two days, I had opted for a Text-To-Speech app over the whiteboard. It’s a special degree of lazy bastardtry when you opt for typing because you were getting too tired from writing. I could not be arsed to write everything out. And in fairness, my boyfriend couldn’t be arsed to wait for me to write it out. Nothing kills the momentum of a conversation more than a scribbling moron struggling to not misspell a response all while trying to fit it onto an 8-inch whiteboard, like some physical tweet.
What on the surface looked like an act of efficiency, was in fact just pure laziness. Efficiency and lazy are cousins of each other. I’m efficient not because I have an obsession with optimization, but rather, I’m lazy and I want to do as little work as possible. I do believe that rather than businesses hiring management consultants, whose only real management experience is of a fantasy football team or Etsy account, they should hire incentivised lazy people. Because they will get the job done in least effort (cost-efficient) way possible.
Turns out there is very little you can’t get across with one word and a short game of charades. Treating every interaction like a Christmas evening. But it felt very unnatural. It had this after taste of impoliteness.
Whenever I am in Europe, I am always taken aback by how succinctly europeans order because, compared to our incessant British waffling, masquerading as politeness, their brevity sits as rudeness. “Bonjour, une baguette, s’il vous plaît” “Hola, un café, por favor.” Greeting+Order+Manners. BOSH.
In contrast to us Brits, their succinct orders make ours look like Shakespearean soliloquies. Where is your obvious and mundane observation of the weather precursor? Where is your feigned reluctance to ask the staff to go to the awful trouble of doing their jobs? Where is your oversharing opening gambit?
Oversharing must be the most prevalent cause of waffling. Like most millennials who refuse to get a proper job, I ‘work’ at a coffee shop. Employing my millennial entitlement, I believe that purchasing one Americano (which I’ll probably forget to drink) grants me the right to use their struggling business’s scant table space as my personal office. This to say, I see dozens of people order every day, and the amount of personal information they spill while ordering is staggering. I didn’t know the cost of coffee was £3 and a secret. MI5 doesn’t need to hack into a suspect’s phones or computers; they just need to speak to their barista. Rather than sending agents undercover in far-right gangs, they should just go to Costa Coffee and ask the staff, ‘Have you had anyone here recently mention anything about boats?’
This has just reminded me of a time when I lived in Bristol. I used to go to the Little Yellow cafe, which was part of the gym I also went to. Christ, I’m basic. But I remember one time, a customer walked in and the barista instinctively said, ‘Hello, sir. What can I get you?’ And the customer replied, ‘Well, my job is doing redundancies and I’ve got the shits, so just a single shot latte today, please.’ So. Many. Questions.
Well, call me Captain Irony because all this talk about waffling just to say I started giving one word answers on my little gay whiteboard.
It also turns out, to my horror, that without my voice, I am completely emotionless in the face. Apparently, I could have been a replacement for Data on USS Enterprise. I had designated all my emotion transmitting into my whiteboard or app, completely forgetting to emphasise my with my body or face. So, rightly, my boyfriend took everything that I was ‘writing’ as sarcastic. How would you interpret someone with a completely sullen blank face holding a sign saying “I love you. You are beautiful”?Mixed signals? Well imagine that for a week.
But there was some positives:
While at the self-service checkout at my local Lidl, having scanned all my shopping, I noticed someone had left their debit card in the machine. I waved over the staff, and pointed at the card while shaking my head. The staff member pulled out the card. I excessively mouthed “I can’t speak”. “You can’t speak English?,” replied the staff-member, “ No problem” and then promptly, in a bid to be helpful, tapped the card on the card machine, paying for my shopping with someone else’s money. Frantically, I typed out into my phone’s notes “I can’t speak. Throat op. That’s not my debit card!”. If you’ve seen the recently surprised Beyonce photos from the Grammy winning Best Album, well, imagine that but it’s a shelf-stacker winning Worst Fuck-up.
Due to us not being able to speak, my boyfriend and I actually managed to get through some television. We even managed two series of Only Murders In The Building on Disney+. It is FANTASTIC. I love a murder mystery (thank you, writers) and I love a bisexual storyline (thank you, Selena Gomez). It’s exactly the type of show I want to be involved in writing and creating one day. Manifest. (Also, we’re Team Howard.)
So what have I learnt being mute for a week
Buy a bigger Whiteboard.
Remember that you’re voiceless, not expressionless.
Act like a pencil: be straight to the point.
If you can’t write with nuance, don’t risk it. It took me 3 days to get out of the dog house after one bad joke.
It’s not your non-verbal communication skills that are tested, but rather, your patience.
Dirty Talk does not sound sexy in a Text-to-Speech app. You just sound like Stephen Hawkins that’s interested in a very different type of black hole.
And most importantly, if you find a debit card in a card machine, make sure you do a bigger shop.
See ya next week x