>Good luck if you ever have a boss or a colleague who prefers rapport and empathetic communication over the more direct, rational style you prefer. You are going to continually wonder why that boss expects you to read their mind.

That hit home for me. I once got called down to HR to find my boss there. I discovered at that moment that she was frustrated with how long it was taking me to do my job. Part of my job is pulling data for mailings out of our database. We have ~1 million constituents, and regularly send mailings with tens of thousands of recipients. She had performed that role before me, and she felt that it could be done much more quickly that I was performing it.

Turns out, I could perform the task as quickly as she expected, but I had totally misunderstood a conversation we had months earlier. Word had gotten to my boss that a person had called in because of a factual error on a piece of mail we had sent them. She came by my desk and asked me about the error, as I had specifically said the file was 99.5% error free. I mentioned that the incorrect information had been put in the database by someone else, and the error rate was about what I had expected. She told me that she wanted 99.9% error free mailings from then on.

Later on, I sent her data for another mailing. She came by my desk and asked if the data was 100% correct. I said I was confident it was 99.9% correct. She said we couldn't have any errors this time, and we needed to make sure that the data was 100% correct. I told her that it was fundamentally impossible to be 100% sure the data was correct. She said that she understood, but she wanted it 99.99% correct, as we couldn't mail constituents information that was wrong. I said it would probably take 10x longer to run the data, but I could do that if she wanted it. She did, so I proceeded to make sure the data was 99.99% correct.

She was absolutely flabbergasted when I brought these conversations up. To her, she thought 100% confidence meant "pretty damn sure" and 99% confidence was somewhere around "It's probably right, maybe." From my perspective, 99.5% correct meant we'd have 5 or fewer bad rows for every 1000 rows in the data.

It was so weird for both of us, because we both thought we had been incredibly clear with the other person. I thought I had been very clear with my point -- I had spoken with her about how long it would take to ensure the data was 99.99% correct several times, because I was concerned about the delay. She had thought she was being emphatic, ad I was just being a pain in the ass. The thing is, that I'm generally not particularly hung up on the difference between literal meaning and figurative meaning, and she generally pretty clear when expressing what she wanted in technical conversations without hyperbole. So she hadn't even considered that I was interpreting her comments literally, and I hadn't considered that she was being hyperbolic.

It was definitely a huge learning experience for both of us. We had both been really stressed for months because we failed to communicate effectively with one another, despite both of us recognizing the same problem and trying to bring it to the other person's attention.