We had “Influencing with Assertiveness” training today at work (as part of a LONG friggin’ meeting). It’s interesting to find that, in my personal life and with my family and friends, I tend to be pretty outspoken, honest, and fairly aggressive. At work? Not so much. I tend to be passive and let people do their own thing. This is something I have to work on to be more effective at my job.
But that’s not what I wanted to talk about.
No no, I wanted to talk about what happened after training. You see, they handed out these plastic binders, heavy ones, that had all of the information that we learned during the course. We were to go home and look at them and learn and all that.
I rode my bus home, listening to a child scream and yell incessantly for 45 minutes all the way. To say the least, I was ready to be done with my day. Especially since I’d been in a meeting for almost nine hours, and I was entirely exhausted by then.
As I got off the bus and it drove past me, I walked to the crosswalk and start crossing the road. There was a corner immediately to my right as I crossed, and a guy pulled up to it in his car, stopped for about 30 milliseconds, and started turning right toward me. Before I even had time to react, he slammed on his brakes, and immediately starts honking his horn at me. And by honking his horn, I mean that he was just leaning in to it. I’d been standing there all of one second, maybe two. I was in the crosswalk. I had the right of way… and I was already pretty upset at my bus ride.
And I thought, “Now is a time I can use my assertiveness training.”
So I stood there. Directly in his way, and he continued on using his horn for another ten seconds. I could see his anger was boiling to the point of “murderous rage”, and I was just smiling on the inside. I couldn’t help it.
Then he rolled down his window and started screaming at me (while still honking). I was sure that, any second, he was going to run me over. So I stepped to one side (back in to the middle of the street), and he started to drive past. It was at this point that I decided my assertiveness training was going to come in handy after all.
I threw the binder at him, pretty much as hard as I could, and hit him square in the face. He didn’t stop. He just sped up and honked all the way down to the end of the street and flipped me off.
I picked up my binder and thought, “Huh, I bet I got my point across.”