The pattern interrupt
It all starts with assuming that abnormal is the new normal. The good, old ways in which people saw each other, smiled a little, took their hats off to see hello to each other where the heart and tongue was in sync and men meant every word they uttered is no longer in vogue.
Welcome to the new world of pattern interrupt!
The person meeting you does not do the usual, on the contrary, he does some thing out of the box-he walks away as if he did not recognise you and then turns around to say ," Of course I recognised you, I was just waiting for you to say hello first,".
Strange are the ways of the world. Now the human being have to react as per the changing idiosyncrasies of the western world. You have to get in a bus, a restaurant or for that matter a loo exactly as you see that hip hop singer do on Television. Any deviation and you are spent force or more precisely old fashioned. Ans you thought that was that! If some maniac on a social networking site pours an ice bucket over his head, that has to be religiously followed by all other people in the universe, as least in the universe of social networking. Any deviation and you are what they call in their gibberish, " Not Coool".
In the world of sales and marketing this trend has caught on rather, "professionally". Earlier you would pick up your Cisco phone and tell the prospect that, " I am Mr.X calling from a company YZX. Do you have any requirement for ABC?" Today, the sales managers want a pattern to be interrupted. " Give them the unexpected" they say often with a confidence as if it has worked millions of times before.
"If the prospect picks up the phone, be silent for five seconds. This would give him an impression that you are an important person who has something important to say,"
The old time when we would respect each other's time slot is gone. Now the thing is that we want the pattern to be interrupted. " Nothing of the same old, same old," "New, novice, giggly and naive" is the order of the day.
" appear unsure, that way they give out more information that you can ever extract with a smart talk," is often repeated in training session of sales.
This infection of pattern interrupt is catching up fast,
" I wish I had hired you two decades ago. You would have been the vice president in the company in record time," this is what my manager wrote in the termination letter in my first organisation after I could not cope up with the pattern interrupt thing.
" A clever salesmen who even negotiated the funeral price with his undertaker and the funeral company," read his epitaph after he died on the day he celebrated his 35th birthday.
God sometimes interrupts with the pattern too, in his inimitable unique ways!