Curious Is a Dangerous Word

The Human Bit, by Frank Peters

It began with a sales email.

Someone had apparently visited the Brida website and noticed the language services we offered.

Only we don’t really offer language services. Not in the way the email imagined them.

The message was personal enough to look personal, but not quite personal enough to suggest anybody had really looked at Brida. So instead of deleting it, I wrote back.

I said I suspected at least some of the prospecting was automated. But rather than complain, I became interested in the machinery behind it.

How had they found Brida? How much research happened before an email went out? Where did automation help? Where did it miss? And where, somewhere between database and inbox, did an actual human being enter the process?

The reply was surprisingly open.

Yes, the original approach had been automated. Yes, Brida had been misunderstood. It also became clear that what was being sold was not really relevant to us.

So there was no sale.

That should probably have been the end of it.

Instead, my questions appeared to spark some curiosity on the other side too. There seemed to be a willingness to talk about how this sort of outreach worked, where automation helped and where personalisation became generic noise.

No sales pitch. Just a conversation.

I liked that.

A cold email had failed at its intended purpose and, somewhere in the wreckage, two people seemed to have found something more interesting.

That is the sort of thing I look for.

Then life intervened. Some time later another message arrived, with an apology for the delay and a link to arrange a call.

It led back towards the sales conversation we had already established made little sense.

There was a small technical mishap along the way, which at least gave Murphy something to do, and then another attempt to arrange much the same thing.

I replied that the interesting conversation, from my point of view, was the one we had stumbled into after the original sales approach had fallen apart.

Eventually the position became clearer.

The professional role on the other side simply did not leave much room for the kind of conversation I was suggesting.

For several days I thought that was the story.

The person had seen something the role could not accommodate. Curiosity had appeared, but the machinery of work had nowhere to put it.

I even started writing about narrow seats.

Then I showed the exchange to someone whose judgement I trust.

They saw something else.

What if there had been no escape from the sales process at all? What if the warmer tone, the openness and the apparent curiosity were simply another way of keeping a prospect engaged?

And what if some of the conversation had itself been shaped by AI?

I don’t know.

That is the uncomfortable part.

I had not fallen for the sales pitch. I had seen through that almost immediately.

Perhaps I had fallen for something much more flattering.

The idea that I had reached the person behind it.

That landed differently, because I realised how much I wanted it to be true.

I wanted the failed transaction to become a conversation. I wanted the script to crack and a human being to appear. I wanted there to be more on the other side than a commercial objective.

Perhaps there was.

Perhaps there wasn’t.

But suddenly I felt a certain sadness about the whole thing.

Not because I had been cheated. Nothing had been bought, promised or lost.

It was smaller than that.

I thought, for a little while, that two strangers had accidentally found a reason to talk.

Now I am not sure.

Curious is a dangerous word.

Curiosity makes you look behind the obvious thing. It gives people another chance. It keeps you at the door a little longer because perhaps there is something worth finding on the other side.

Usually I rather like that about myself.

This time I am less certain.

A few days ago I thought about sending another message.

Nothing dramatic. Just a friendly hello and perhaps another small opening for the conversation to continue.

I decided not to.

Not because I am angry. I’m not.

And not because I have concluded that everything was a sales tactic.

I simply noticed that I was about to create another opening because I still wanted the story to continue.

So I stopped.

And that is where the sadness sits.

Perhaps the curiosity was genuine.

Perhaps the job got in the way.

Perhaps the machinery simply became clever enough to sound curious back.

I may never know.

But there is something unsettling in realising that I was not vulnerable to the product.

I thought I had found the human behind the sales email. Perhaps what I had really found was my own willingness to look for one.

We are getting better at recognising obvious sales language.

What happens when persuasion learns to speak in the language of warmth, interest and curiosity?

I don’t have an answer.

I only know that, for a little while, I thought somebody on the other side of an inbox had stepped out of the script.

I rather hoped they had.