There is always something. I recently had the irritated displeasure of attempting to raise a communications channel to a certain group of adults and found the process to be highly educational. Recently Apple had instituted a series of advanced security questions that get paired to an Apple ID when you make a purchase in the month of April. These questions ranged from “Where did your parents first meet?” to “What was the first concert you attended?”, those sorts of questions.

At work, I have an Apple ID that I use to manage our iOS devices here and there and one of the people I tried to contact had to be the one that set the security questions, as I had gotten an email stating that someone set the security questions on the account on April 14th. So I figured someone was just absent-minded, we all have that from time to time, so I texted everyone to please get back to me if they had answered any Apple security questions.

I did get just a handful out of 23 people reply to me in one fashion or another. I then shifted the request over to email and also sent another request “If you have answered any security questions, please let me know what they are.” and for about a week of waiting, just the handful out of 23 deigned to reply to me.

Right after that I started a request with iTunes support at Apple to petition them to wipe away the erroneous security questions on the account and they were busy working on that. Last night they sent me an email telling me that the security questions were reset and that I could login and re-answer them, which I did late last night. So the technical angle of this issue is now a solved non-issue.

But what does bother me, and it’s more vexatious then a real concern is how people replied, or didn’t to my inquiry. I had made the erroneous assumption that when I send out a text twice, and an email asking for information that there is a built-in component to that message which people should reply either way. It was for work, it was important, I used the word “please”. The response I received back after bringing this up was “I didn’t know what it was about so I didn’t reply.” and it was my fault I suppose for assuming that people would, by themselves, assume that a reply was expected. Out of 23 people, only five were not question marks, the rest were crickets. Nobody here but us crickets.

So in the future I vow that I will include “reply requested” to my communications. I hate to dumb it down so far as to treat them like children, but after this, I can’t help but think that’s going to be the only way I can establish a communications channel with these people. I have great fear for when I have to establish a technical communications channel with people, these specifically, but even people in general when there is an emergency. There is this sense of “deer in the headlights” that is deeply upsetting to me. If you get a message that you don’t understand – which is the better path? To actually communicate about it in hopes of resolving it or just sit in the dark, ignoring it, hoping it goes away?

It’s a lot like Marco Polo playing Ping Pong with himself. It’s not a game, it’s just a sad old man standing in front of a ping-pong table with a stiff little white ping pong ball bouncing on the table.