Say what happened

A woman in Beni Suef sells children's backpacks through her page. A mother writes to her, angry. She ordered the blue one with the rocket and received a pink one with flowers, the night before a school trip, and her son cried.

There are three ways to answer.

The first is defensive. Every order is checked twice. The colours are shown clearly in the photographs. Hundreds of customers have been happy. Each line is the seller arguing with an accusation of carelessness that the mother never quite made, but that the seller can already hear. The reply ends up being about the seller's feelings, and the mother finds nothing in it about her son.

The second is attacking. Perhaps the wrong colour was selected. Perhaps the message was not read properly. It might even be right, but it no longer matters, because the mother stopped listening at the first sentence and is now writing a review.

The third is plain. You ordered the blue one and I sent the pink one. That was my mistake. The blue one leaves with the courier tomorrow morning, and he will collect the pink one at the same time. Nothing to pay.

It reads almost like a weather report. Here is what happened. Here is what happens next. No blame imagined, no blame thrown.

This is harder than it looks, because the story running in our heads is loud. We picture the other person's contempt, rehearse our defence, and bring all of that into the words before they have said anything of the kind.

The skill is to set that story down for a moment and describe the situation as it actually is. People can hear facts. They can act on them too. It is almost everything else that gets in the way.