Every single time I swear it’s because the person doesn’t want a written record and has figured out that they’re more likely to get what they want if they can bullshit you to your face, when it’s harder to parse out all the bullshit in person.
It’s a favoured strategy of rental agents for this reason.
At my last job I managed a team of coders in Bangalore. They absolutely always wanted instructions vocally because then there would be no written record of what I actually told them to do.
This is why I send a “summary” of every call as a message when we’re done. I’ve had some people call me right back and tell me to delete it. I tell them if we can’t agree on what happened on the call then it didn’t and I’ll just ignore the contents of the call.
The urge is very strong but I like to do what I can to foster good relationships with my coworkers (especially my leadership) so I usually just go with “We spoke about the summary of the previous call. Frank would like to add/clarify that _______” to be generous.
Very shady. Because they want the plausible deniability.
I just tell them I need notes to keep track of my conversations and refer back to them frequently because my autism and ADHD causes me to question myself or forget what was discussed.
Then if they wanna push it further I can take my records to HR and ask if they feel like allowing this ADA violation to continue. Doesn’t work for everyone, I know, but it works for me!
Every single time I swear it’s because the person doesn’t want a written record and has figured out that they’re more likely to get what they want if they can bullshit you to your face, when it’s harder to parse out all the bullshit in person.
It’s a favoured strategy of rental agents for this reason.
At my last job I managed a team of coders in Bangalore. They absolutely always wanted instructions vocally because then there would be no written record of what I actually told them to do.
This is why I send a “summary” of every call as a message when we’re done. I’ve had some people call me right back and tell me to delete it. I tell them if we can’t agree on what happened on the call then it didn’t and I’ll just ignore the contents of the call.
I really hope you send them a summary of them calling to ask you to delete the summary.
The urge is very strong but I like to do what I can to foster good relationships with my coworkers (especially my leadership) so I usually just go with “We spoke about the summary of the previous call. Frank would like to add/clarify that _______” to be generous.
Jesus that’s shady. “Excuse me I just decided to call you again where there’s no record and tell you to delete the record of our call.”
“Why not correct the record in written form? You can email back can’t you?”
Like what do you say to that? Wow.
Very shady. Because they want the plausible deniability.
I just tell them I need notes to keep track of my conversations and refer back to them frequently because my autism and ADHD causes me to question myself or forget what was discussed.
Then if they wanna push it further I can take my records to HR and ask if they feel like allowing this ADA violation to continue. Doesn’t work for everyone, I know, but it works for me!