Originally Posted by
T.J. Bender
You and I would not do well in a difficult business negotiation. If that were someone's first comment to me (and I'm the head negotiator for the deals I'm involved in at my company), my response would be to get up, hand them a business card, and tell them to call me back when they're interested in handling this like an adult instead of making insulting comments from the get-go.
First, what comments that I made were insulting?
I have thought about this today, and I have moved towards your position a bit. Yes, the splitting of the remarks into separate comments is preferable, but it may not be possible. In my specific case there are limiting factors. I am significantly hearing impaired, and questions and answers at the checkpoint are often impossible. I often can not communicate in a two-way fashion in a noisy area.
And, I would like to play off of your office analogy because it was a good one.
When we step into the checkpoint we indeed step into their "office" as you put it. However, we are there for a specific reason and they have a specific number of ways to handle our immediate presence. They can send us to the WTMD, the scanner, or a random pat down. They have that discretion.
An opt out, on the other hand, is not within their discretion and asking for one creates the adversarial relationship. The words said by me to accompany that are intended to clarify the situation as I understand it.
Let's suppose that in your job you deal with customers or vendors or whatever. You have within your discretion three distinct ways of dealing with them. Let's say it is a vendor. You tell the vendor that he is to do a certain thing to complete the process. He objects and states his preference, a perfectly legitimate one, but not one that is within your discretion to offer. It is also one that requires you to hand the vendor off to other people, several people perhaps, and will involve more time and resources. It disrupts the process flow and creates a bottleneck. The organization is not readily prepared to handle this change. You may balk. The vendor then asks for your supervisor as he knows he may ask for this process. That is the effect of an opt out.
As to whether we could do well in a business negotiation, I think we would be fine. You would be better prepared than the average TSO, I would not be expecting a belittlement or harassment, you would not be in a position to steal my stuff while I am not looking, and we each would have forwarded open documents of the process to each other so that we were in complete understanding of what to expect, and where to begin. Quite unlike the CP.
Also a bit different: I do not negotiate deals. I participate in the detection of problems and communicate the causes and corrections. Often that cause is across the table from me.