July 7, 2004

Evelyn Rodriguez: Did you know in spoken conversation or public speaking, people respond to you more than the words (and therefore concepts) you mouth? Professor Albert Mehrabian of UCLA’s research determined which factors influenced listener impressions the most and they were: 55% non-verbal (facial expressions, body language) 38% voice (quality, tone, pitch, variation, volume) 7% […]

Steve Pilgrim pointed me to James Lileks’s entry today about his trouble with a DirectTV installation: One service call turned into seven. One three-hour wait window turned into 21 hours. I can still see the original installer who screwed everything up — scrawny, nervy, tar-stained teeth, a lummox associate whom you expected to say “I