My family has serious communication issues, I won’t deny that. We all may as well be living on different planets.
The Friday before commencement, I called up my dad to find out when they were going to be arriving so that I could be sure I was available to receive them. I went out for a bike ride at around 16:00 with Bill and Max toward Albany, a ride I’ve come to like a lot and will probably miss when I finally leave RPI this week, with all my worldly possessions. We arrived at Albany and decided it was time for dinner, so we crossed over the footbridge that goes over 787 to go to Wolff’s Biergarten. As we were arriving, I got a call from my dad asking me where I was and why I wasn’t getting ready for the School of IT graduation dinner. A couple of rather distressing minutes later, he explained that they were still a bit of a way off from Albany and were rushing as fast as they could to get there. I was still quite confused about this graduation dinner stuff.
Several weeks ago, invitations were sent out by all the schools for graduation dinners and I discussed with my mom a few of the details of that. Initially, she had responded to the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences dinner. Then I told her that my primary major was IT and that I should go to the dinner for that school, not realizing that I probably knew more people in HASS than IT. Though, truth be told, I wanted my parents to meet Jeff Miner, Deputy CIO of RPI, because I knew he’d be able to make a better impression on my parents that would be more representative of my work at RPI. So that’s where my mom and I left off with our plans. I was going to leave it up to her and my dad to figure out to which dinner they wanted to go (IT was $30 a plate and HASS was free).
Fast forward back to the biergarten. So we’re eating dinner and I get another call from my mom. I can barely make her out since she’s talking on the X5’s integrated speaker phone system and it’s loud where I am. So I hang up and call her back on her cell. It turns out that there’s been a severe disconnect in the communications between myself, my dad, and my mom. Big surprise. It turns out that my dad had told my mom that he had made ‘reservations’, not specifying for what he had made reservations. My mom took that, in context, to mean that he had made reservations for one of the dinners, particularly the IT dinner. In actuality, he had made reservations for the hotel and this was what he was actually confirming. My mom, now herself assured that reservations had been made, did nothing beyond cancelling the reservation for the HASS dinner. Meanwhile, I was assuming that all was well and that my parents had taken care of all the stuff they needed to take care of since the dinner was going to be costing them money and I didn’t want to be obligating them to more than they felt they should. (This, by the way, comes from a deeply rooted impulse of mine to acquiesce to my parents’ needs, ultimately resulting from having been convinced by my mom that I am manipulative and deceitful.)
When I got off the phone with my mom, it was clear that there were no dinner reservations, I was already having dinner and an hour bike ride away from Troy, and my dad was pissed off beyond belief because he had rushed off of Long Island, got stuck in rush hour traffic in the Bronx, and was speeding (90 mph on the NYS Thruway is not speeding) to Albany for most of the way.
At least they got the message about the laptop…though the message my dad was sending through it was a severely sour one as he presented it – one of biting sarcasm, bitter cost, and little pride. I hope one day he learns to stop being so angry and realizes that we do appreciate him and would appreciate him more if he’d realize that his passive aggressive and sometimes just plain aggressive attitude is what puts us off.