What it does at work
Work deserves its own chapter because work is where slips are densest and charges are most expensive. Forty emails a day, half of them terse. Meetings where six people are trying to get a word in. Decisions you weren't copied on, credit that went to the wrong name, a manager whose one-word replies could mean anything. If you charge at work the way you charge at home, you'll spend your career surrounded by enemies you invented.
The blunt email is the classic. "Please send the figures by Friday." You've seen in chapter 5 that the sender heard it as brisk and doesn't know it read as cold. Now add what work does to writing. People write emails between meetings, on phones, in the gaps. Brevity at work is a symptom of load, not a message about you, and the people who write the shortest emails are usually the busiest, which usually means the most senior, which is why the charge "they think they're too important to say hello" is so easy to make and so rarely true. They're not too important. They've got eleven minutes.
The meeting interruption is the other one. Meetings interrupt everyone, and the person who feels most interrupted is usually the person paying most attention to their own turn. That's not a criticism. It's just that the count you're keeping is a count of your interruptions, and you're not keeping anyone else's, so yours looks like a pattern and theirs looks like meetings. An earlier book, Let them finish, is about being the interrupter, and it'll show you how invisible it is from the inside.
What the charge costs at work is a reputation. Not for being wrong about motives, because nobody knows what you've charged. For being touchy. The person who's clipped after every terse email, who reads the seating plan for slights, who takes the uncopied decision as a message, becomes the person others handle carefully, and being handled carefully is the opposite of being trusted. The irony is complete. The charge that was meant to stop you being overlooked makes you someone people route around.