PesterPlomacy

The power of annoyance

Hello Mr. John Doe. My name is Kaleb Rogers, and I’m calling from the Bureau of Economic Analysis regarding an outstanding, mandatory government survey — namely, the BE-13 — which needs to be completed by a representative of your company for the FDI transaction completed in October of 2014. Please give me a call back when you have the opportunity, or you can reach me by email at kaleb.rogers@bea.gov.

The above quote is one I spoke ad nauseam at my former job as an economist with the Bureau of Economic Analysis. After cutting away all the ego cushions, resume embellishments, and bureaucratic jargon, my job boiled down to a fairly simple task: convince, persuade, demand, or seduce representatives of various international companies to give us their data. The survey that would include such data was mandatory, sure, but that didn’t stop people from dodging my calls, delaying the assignment, or mining for whatever minute facet would exclude them from the legal obligation that they now carried. So, what did I do to coerce these American businesspeople to release the information to which they so tenaciously cleaved? Well, I annoyed them, sometimes relentlessly. As I often described myself to others during this period of my life, I was essentially a bill collector, but for data. And I was good at it. As one of my victims would eventually write about me in an email to another colleague, “Man, they really want this survey.” The printed email hung snuggly to the grey, mesh wall of my Office Space style cubicle.

Weirdly enough, at a job that at first glance had negligible transferable skills, I found the power of annoyance to be pervasive in my life. Soon I was applying this PesterPlomacy to solve other, personal problems. Instead of calling the CEO, CFO, Legal Counsel, and Financial Controller of companies in an attempt to get their BE-13 data, I was calling the desk secretary, department head, and building caretaker to get essential information for my Peace Corps medical clearance from Kaiser Permanente. Or I was perseveringly pursuing the customer service rep, insurance claim specialist, and executive office of Sprint to sort out problems with my phone bill. It seemed to work. Annoyance is a negative stimulus in people’s lives, and to remove it, they may do something as crazy as helping you.

Cut to now. Currently a Peace Corps volunteer in Coastal Colombia, with a possibly (slightly) more accurate job title, I live in a world where meetings that start at 10:00 AM really start at 10:30; a world where rain signifies that a meeting has been canceled; and a world where Peace Corps formally teaches the “Colombian Triple Check” (a process in which you check with a Costeño 3 times to confirm a meeting). PesterPlomacy is valuable here. No, actually it is essential. The only difference is that instead of annoying people into helping me, I’m trying to annoy them into helping themselves.

On one occasion I confirmed several meeting times with an associate to discuss community savings groups at 10AM Friday morning. We spoke once in person about it and exchanged messages about it several times via WhatsApp. On the day of the meeting, I decided to call around 9:30 just to be absolutely sure. She had forgotten and would not have come otherwise. She mentioned she was in a rush and asked if she could come a little early. I said yes. She arrived at 10:10 AM.

On a separate occasion I had asked my school coordinators to send teachers to a training that could allow students to meet Nobel Prize laureates. They seemed ecstatic about the idea at first, but, as time went on, they responded to less of my emails and gave increasingly vague answers about who we would send and why. The “read” WhatsApp checkmarks in our message group shined brightly blue in my face, signifying they had read my messages without response. Finally, I went to their office and approached them in person the day before and made my pitch. The next day I was in Barranquilla with two teachers (and my host dad for some reason) attending the teacher training. PesterPlomacy had worked.

I’m not sure if it’s human nature, information technology, or something that hasn’t even occurred to me, but humans of the 21st century seem to be flakey creatures. How often do two friends agree to have a phone call to catch up that never happens. How often do people both agree via text that they “should totally hang out” only to see the plans never formulate. It’s so easy today to float out a low-effort, non-committal “yeah let’s do this” message and then feign responsibility as the proverbial ball is now seemingly out of both party’s courts and floating in some neutral zone, 38th parallel, no man’s land.

Gandhi once said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Though I’m almost certain he wasn’t talking about annoying people, I think his belief aligns here. In Peace Corps, or perhaps life in general, one must be the action taker, or — as Peace Corps would put it — the agent of change. One cannot sit idly by and hope that people will simply take action around them. One must introduce energy into the system if they want to see their desires materialize. One must call their friend if they want to talk to them, rather than letting the relationship thin out over half-assed plans to talk or meet up. One must call a Costeño thirty minutes before their meeting to make sure they’re still going to come. And, yes, sometimes one must annoy someone until they shockingly express to a colleague, “Man, they really want this survey.”