Hyperbole

Not so long ago, really - four days ago when I was leaving for Japan - I read the book The Art of Thinking Clearly at the airport bookstore and learned about planning fantasy. In brief, it's the illusion of grandiosity when we make plans. How often do we allow this idea of grandiosity to go rampage at the buffet dinner? If there's an Olympics for that kind of fantasy, I should have been awarded a thousand world-class gold medals.

Now imagine your teacher gives you an assignment and lets you decide the length of that paper and fix up the deadline to hand in the final script. The temptation is oh so great. You might have known that you'd failed to hand in term papers in due course, but you guess you're better this time. Your - I should say our - tendency always is to come up with an exaggerated goal. Plus, we make wrong estimation how quick we can achieve the goal. We promise way more than we can deliver. We set the alarm clock at such unrealistic hour that we sleep through it. We have a natural penchant for the rose-tinted spectacles.

If I'm candid, I do not believe the lesson of planning fantasy made me worry one jot about how easy I fall prey to the fantasy. You can bet I still have that fantasy. That's the reason I have been kicking myself to finish as many items on my to-do list as possible during the last four days. The good news is I did manage to complete a peer review for a medical journal, write few magazine and newsletter articles, reply a number of unreturned e-mails at my hotel room.

"Not bad," I congratulated myself and packed my luggage (before checking out tomorrow). Then I remembered that I'd brought two books and few magazines for this trip. Oh drats, I didn't even finish one book.

Guess the second book will just have to wait till next trip.

Never mind, I tried to find a crumb of comfort by reminding myself that the title of that unfinished book is The Slow Fix.

Thursday

In many ways, going to academic conference is a good way to learn: the program usually runs the gamut from basic science (like zebrafish) to patient care (that we do now and then). The downside is that some lectures aren't attractive and there's a day's worth of activity outside the conference venue.

This week, I'm attending a conference in Tokyo. Thinking of all the Tokyo's top sights mentioned in Lonely Planet, I knew pretty well the reason of some empty chairs in the conference hall. Many of the sights are impossible to miss, I know. But when it comes to the courage that students are traditionally supposed to be born with to skip class, I'm a little lacking.

I hadn't meant to leave the conference hall until the cows come home. That I stayed late led me to feel both irrationally proud and profoundly tired. Unfortunately, most museums in Japan close at five (and with the last entry around half hour before closing). After that, I picked up the program book and handy guide, figuring out the next move. That is when I found out Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography opens till eight on Thursday. And it's Thursday today.

I'd be mad not to call this luck.

Chameleon Effect

Call myself professional on one hand, and I teach my students to learn from waitresses on the other.

It does make sense.

After my recent lesson from the waitress, I went on to read more on the waitresses' strategic mimicry, and how mimicry increases the odds to build rapport and move others. To me, the answer that the waitress also doesn't want her customer to wait is trying to attune, to enhance liking, to get inside the head of the customer, to draw the map showing we're in the same boat. Unbeknownst to her customer, the two parties had been led to go in synch with each other at the drop of a hat, sharing common ground.

If you aren't convinced, you might not have heard the experiment of verbal mimicry. And if you'll let me, I'd like to tell you a little bit about how that experiment works. Just think: When was the last time you went to a restaurant and made order for your dinner? How did the waitress answer? In an experiment of customer behavioural patterns, sixty groups of customers like you, without their awareness, were randomly served by two types of waitresses. In the mimicry condition, waitresses repeated all orders from the drinks to the cheque. Word for word. In the non-mimicry condition, the orders were not repeated, but the waitress made clear that she understood the order by words like "okay" or "coming up!"

At the end of the day, the mimicking waitresses earned a whopping 70 percent more tips. I repeat: 70 percent more.

What is the lesson for doctors? Well, I'll let you decide.

We Too

Sometimes the line between the professional and unskilled job is blurry.

Tonight I went to order takeaway dinner. Quite a number of people were waiting outside the cafeteria. Most of us, it turns out, were there because domestic maids don't usually work on Sunday. Getting a table is tricky and may not be easy on Sunday evening. And yet it's practical. It's visceral. I wasn't surprised when the customers grumbled about the long wait.

"Heck, it's quite a bit of waiting for my turn," one of them shouted, hungry and cantankerous, "but we're just looking for a table for two. Why so?"

The scene is pretty familiar to me. It's the same as waiting at any emergency room in public hospitals - okay, not exactly the same, because it happens seven days a week in hospital instead of on Sunday. I'd expect the waitress to talk back and piss them off. That's very much what we heard in the emergency rooms. But, to my surprise, there's a flip side to the story at the cafeteria tonight. "I wish, too," answered the waitress, "that you don't have to wait. If only those people finished their meal earlier and left."

A real professional way to talk to the customers in a queue, I thought on my way home with the takeaway dinner.