How to Tell When Someone Isn't Listening to You

Earlier today I was sitting outside of Starbucks enjoying a cup of coffee and an unseasonably beautiful day here in Little Rock. A woman walked into Starbucks, leaving her dog outside. The dog was, itself, kind of interesting. It was the breed of dog that looks like a greyhound but with really long fur. The woman left the dog untied while she went inside, and it did an admirable job of behaving itself like a well-behaved dog should. A few minutes later, a couple of young women--not sure how old they were but probably early college-aged--walked by and immediately starting gushing about how "pretty he is." After recovering from the shock of two girls were calling me "pretty" I realized they were actually talking about the dog. They had both gone over, about ten feet away from me, and were leaning over the dog and fawning. A woman who works at that Starbucks--Joley or Jolene or Jo Lee or something like that--was just arriving for her shift and stopped to give a lecture to the girls about how dangerous it is lean over a dog they don't know. According to her, at least, dogs will jump up and bite people if they feel crowded, so it's actually pretty dangerous to do that if you don't know the dog very well. Throughout this lecture, the girls continued to say how pretty they thought the dog was. The end of the conversation, which lasted well over 50 seconds, concluded with

Jo Lee/Jolie/etc: Just be careful and don't lean over dogs you don't know in the future.
Girl #1: He really is pretty.
Girl #2: Yeah, real pretty.

This made me think a little bit about listening. I don't know how J however her name is spelled felt about her interaction with these two young women, but my impression was that those two little punks didn't listen to a word she said. Anyway, ultimately, my point here is to say that if you have a conversation with a person and they're still saying absolutely nothing other than what they were saying at the start of the conversation, chances are that they weren't listening to a single freakin word you just said to them.

This is important because I have occasionally fallen victim to bad listeners and more often been a bad listener in the past. It's something to work on; being a good listener is something I've prided myself on and is definitely the best skill a man can have.

Luckily, since this is a blog, I probably don't need to feel bad about doing a terrible job of making a point here. But I will try to think of something inspirational to say just cause...hmmm...

"To end a sentence with a preposition, that is a thing up with which I shall not put!"
-Supposedly said by Winston Churchill, but there are a lot of variations on this one and no one knows when he may have said it, so it's probably just a made up line.