Bad Faith

I often get the sense that people are asking me questions they don’t want answers to. It’s a kind of social blindness I have, which is weird because my parents did this all the time. You’d think I’d be used to it, but somehow I never learned to tell when it’s best just to tell people what they expect to hear and go on with my life.

I don’t mean the general “How are you?” type of thing. I’m pretty good at that one. I understand that the proper response is to say something true, but without getting too deep into it. Or if a friend asks, “What do you want to do tonight?” the safest thing to do is to say, “I don’t know! We could [A] or we could [B]. What are you up for?” These I can manage.

But in dating and in my professional life, which have way too much in common, there’s some combination of being a woman and being an adjunct that means there is an appropriate answer to all questions that I am not realizing at the moment is supposed to be true for me. I don’t particularly want to go out of my way to explain everything all the time, or get into a big serious discussion about everything, but a question about my motivations is a question about something I’ve probably thought a lot about. And then, too late, I find that it wasn’t a good-faith question. The asker didn’t really want to know what I thought. He or she was trying to find out whether I adhered to some idea in his or her own mind, and thought that the power difference between us was all the instruction I needed.

It’s something that bothered me a great deal when I was an undergraduate, and I used to call professors out on it. How can you ask me what I feel or how I approach a problem and then tell me I’m wrong? According to the form of the question, which is how I actually feel about a text, or how I actually think, I answered that question just fine. As a teacher, I try very hard not to do this. If I get a surprising answer, we can talk about that. And if I sense my students are just trying to impress me by saying exactly what they think I want them to, I wrinkle my nose a bit.

I went through a rather intense period of personal growth the day I stopped letting my parents ask bad-faith questions. Do they really want to know about my personal life? I tell them, just enough that they realize they can’t ask and get the answer they want. Now they just tell me what they want, and I can tell them how I plan to respond to that. It’s fair.

I’m about to start applying for a lot of jobs and (hopefully) going to a lot of interviews, and I worry about this inability I have to tell when someone is asking something and wants a very specific answer. My parents say I need to learn to keep my nose down and stop being a pain in the ass in professional situations. I sort of figure that it’s best that they know I’m not someone who responds well to passive-aggression or manipulation; it’s an interview, not a quiz.

For some reason, I feel like I’m asking a group of people who have the same problem. Maybe you have found ways to deal with this? There’s the option of never getting a job in academia and doing something completely independent with your life so that you never have to be the good little girl again, but for some reason I feel compelled to show that, no, I am a good little girl–just not in the way you imagined for me.

4 responses to “Bad Faith”

  1. Josh K-sky says:

    I’m not exactly sure what kinds of questions you’re worried about, but something I try to do in interviews is ask specific questions about what the person is looking for. Not just “what are you looking for in this position” but also “how can I help you accomplish what you want to accomplish?” I’m not sure how that would work for academic jobs but the thing I try to set up is the idea that I am curious about the interviewer’s interests.

    I wonder if there’s something in that to help you turn passive-aggression into something useful: clearly there’s something here you want, why don’t I ask you what that is and give you room to talk about it instead of being constrained by code?

    I think it’s possible to do that without acting as if you’re calling a bluff, although that is a peril.

  2. PB says:

    I am facinated by this post and feel I should say something profound in response. Unfortunately I am too lost in thought to come up with much. But there is something you bring up that I think makes all human conversation both provocative and infuriating – you can’t really read people’s minds and yet some people can intuit better than others. Is this intuition a skill you can learn or a voodoo power that you either have or you don’t? I.e. – do some people just know how they are supposed to respond to certain questions or were there clues and I just did not read the memo correctly. I have been really trying to listen more and without expectation as to questions and responses – but I still find myself launching into some convoluted or too intellectual or too personal of an answer and can see the person I am talking to drift or disapprove. Damn, misread again. Is a good girl or is it simply living in a different space than most people? hmmmmm – must think more.

  3. Rachel says:

    I am still learning how to play the game at work, which all too often feels like a dumb Dilbert cartoon. For example, if you think someone’s idea is terrible and are about to rip them a new one, you preface it by saying, “It’s clear that you’ve given this a lot of thought and energy, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you publicly for your input.”

    Speaking in code is exhausting!

    Just went up for promotion last winter, and learned that I have a reputation for being a “straight shooter” (midwest-ese for “tactless bitch”). Not sure how this happened, as I’ve been straining to be diplomatic ever since I got here.

    Having conducted a lot of interviews, however, I have to say that I’m gauging my prospective colleagues’ ability to do the same. Diplomacy is part of the job. Just something to think about.

    p.s. Good luck with the application process. The best wisdom I got was, “Only about 10% of the decision-process has anything to do with you.” So many other variables are out of your hands, so don’t sweat them if you can help it.

  4. Rachel: I used to complain about the midwest because of the same basic characteristic of discourse there. I’d always say: when someone in the midwest asks you how you are, there is a very narrow range of acceptable answers (“fine thanks!” or something a little sunnier) that won’t make people look at you as crazy and possibly dangerous.

    AWB: Job interviews always feel like an impossibly awkward, thoroughly contrived piece of conversational choreography to me. I’ve only ever had one job (not coincidentally my best and longest) where I felt like I was honest in my interview and never felt like I had to guess the code word.