I’ve determined that people must listen in the same fashion that firewalls and ACL’s do. They have a series of patterns, and as soon as the input (what someone else is saying) matches any of their patterns they simply ignore everything else. Two recent examples:

• I’ve been calling a lot of potential vendors this week (I can’t tell you how much I hate salespeople right now). Usually one of the first pieces of information we exchange is our names and employers. With almost every single one when I have said “I work for the Navy Federal Credit Union” the response I get is along the lines of “let me transfer you to our government sales team”. They simply heard the word “Navy” and stopped listening to the rest.
• I went to the DMV this morning to both transfer my driver’s license and register my car. I told that to each person I spoke to, however all they heard was “transfer my driver’s license…”. When I was done and asked about the car I was told that since I hadn’t done them both when I got to the window the first time (which I could have, but no one bothered to give me the form or ask for the car’s title), I had to start all over at the back of the line. After 30 minutes of waiting with only one person helped I walked out. (Yes, I know that means I’ll have to go back later, sigh).

Speaking of the DMV, I got there 5 minutes before it opened (8:15) expecting a small crowd of maybe 10 people. Instead the line was around the corner and had maybe 100 people in it. If I hadn’t known better I would have assumed it was the line for Bruce Springsteen tickets. When I go back I’ll have to try showing up around 7:30.