The Nature of Communication Transmitting and Receiving Messages - Assignment Example

The Nature of Communication Transmitting and Receiving Messages Four months back, some family friends were over at our place and we all decided to go for a picnic. The guests included Jim and Sera, two of my really good friends and we had met after what seemed ages, so we were all overly excited about the picnic and yes it would not be wrong to say that apart from the adventure ahead there was little all three of us could actually think about. Our mothers were busy preparing snacks for the picnic and I had the responsibility of locking the house up.

So I did the needful while cracking jokes with Jim. The locks of our doors have door knobs and do not necessarily need keys to get locked. I just pressed the doorknobs and shut the doors. My mother had specifically asked me to put the keys in the picnic basket and I had delegated the task to Sera. So we left the house for the picnic, all excited and it turned out later that none of us remembered to keep the keys, so we were all locked outside the house. This was discovered on our return from the picnic when we had to get in the house and my mother asked me for the keys and I asked Sera and found out that no one had kept the keys.

What followed were some extremely caustic words from my mother, the thrashing seemed to be a never-ending one. I apologized and tried speaking but my mother was only asking questions and not willing to hear the answers, “You and your baseless arguments,” she said. I knew what I had done was a big mistake since we were all tired and we needed to get into the house. Moreover we had guests with us and this predicament would have reflected terribly on us, since we did not even have spare keys to the house.

There was only one bunch of keys and that was locked inside the house. Getting a locksmith would have meant an utter waste of a lot of money. My mother kept saying that I just was not responsible enough and since my friends were over I was just not interested in listening to what she was saying. I felt that she was playing the role of a time-oriented listener or an action-oriented listener, since she got impatient and was clearly not interested in my nervously put and unstructured clarifications.

Therefore, in part the communication lapse was due to both, the transmission of poorly formed messages and a lack of the intension to listen on part of my mother. I could understand her frustration but I felt that she could have been thoughtful of the fact that we had guests around and her thrashing me in isolation would have been different than her scolding me in front of a group. The presence of others however, did have a positive impact. Everyone tried to pacify my mother and then Sera spoke on my behalf, since it was clear that mother was not interested in what I had to say but since Sera was our guest she would not have scolded her.

So Sera said that it was her fault since she said she would put the keys in the basket and forgot whereas I thought she had done it. I tried making up to my mother by trying to get to the keys with the help of sticks and pipes through the garage window and finally managed to get the keys after considerable struggle. That helped ease the situation and I apologized to my mother later when her anger had faded away. However, that episode always brings back bad memories of a great picnic that ended up in a disaster.