What it does to them

Now the other side of the slip. The colleague who talked over you doesn't know they did. What they know is that since Monday you've been short with them, and they've gone back through the week looking for what they did, and found nothing, and concluded that you're moody, or don't like them, or have something going on. Which is to say they've made a charge about you, from your behaviour, with no access to your reasons. They're doing exactly what you did, and they're doing it because you did it first.

An earlier book in this series, You don't have to win this one, describes a spiral in which each person sees the other as biased, responds in kind, and looks more biased to the other for doing so. The charge starts the same kind of spiral, at a lower temperature. You cool, they notice, they cool, you notice, and now there's a real coolness between you that both of you can point to as proof. The original slip is buried under it. Neither of you remembers that it began with a message that went under a stack of others.

There's a quieter effect too. People become what they're treated as, a little. Treat a colleague as someone who dismisses you and they'll find you harder to be warm with, because warmth towards someone who's clipped with you takes effort, and they'll spend the effort elsewhere. Treat a friend as someone who's drifting and you'll stop making the calls that would have stopped the drift. The charge is partly a prediction, and predictions about people have a way of arranging the evidence. That's my interpretation, but I don't think it's a stretch from what the marriage studies show.

And they never get the chance to explain, because you never asked. Most people, told "I thought you'd ignored me on purpose", would be startled and a bit hurt, and would explain, and the explanation would be a Tuesday. You've been saving them the trouble by convicting them in private. That's not a kindness. It's the thing you'd least like done to you.