Be The Good Repute

A couple of days ago, or more accurately, yesterday, I encountered myself in an atrocious situation. One, in which I could have gotten out of, if I had used appropriate argumentation. Such as the one explained in Thank You For Arguing by, Jay Heinrichs, in chapters 10-12.

I had this lunch, and was supposed to pick up a friend on my way there, and yes, I was driving. First of all my stubborn self convinced my mom to let me take the better car, instead of the crappy one I usually drive. When I picked up my friend we where already late, so I was kind of in a hurry. Finally the point is, with me being so unfocused on my driving, and so distracted, I crashed the car, to another car.

Nothing was going on right, we where already extremely late to the lunch, the lady I crashed was exceedingly mad because her car was new, so she wasn’t willing to make some kind of simple solution, and my friend was hysterical, oh and not to recall that we where in the middle of the septima, in rush hour. My argumentation with the lady was pointless because we where screaming at each other, it had turned into a fight instead of an argument.

Now, I couldn’t quite use passive voice, because according to the book, passive voice is to: “ pretend things happened on their own” (Pg. 91), when even I couldn’t fool anyone that it wasn’t anyone’s fault but mine. I couldn’t calm the audience (in this case the lady, that by the way was quite old, who I crashed) with humor, since that would just make her a lot madder that she initially was. Or much less could I have gone completely against her in a clever way, and have taken a stance, because that would make things worse. But what I could have done, is used her common place to turn the argument to my favor.

            From what I can recall from the reading, babbling by the audience, is one way to find out their common place, as well as the language used when thy turn you down. Well, this lady wouldn’t stop mentioning the fact that her car was new, and when I insisted on making some king of agreement between us, she wouldn’t stop saying that she had to call her ‘asegurador’ whatever that was. So clearly that was her common place, and instead of going against her, I should’ve used that to make some kind of agreement.

            Although there was now way to fix this incident quickly, I could have made it much quicker than what it was, for say, one hour instead of three. And I could have stepped up and ended up looking much more respectable. If I knew what I know now, I would have called my insurance right away (using her common place and making it seem as my decision to fix tings), instead of two hours later when the police told me to do so, and have them fix everything quickly, in place of fighting and going against everything. Clearly there was no way of fixing this to make the argumentation completely in my favor, but there was certainly a much simpler and clever way of fixing it.