Let Me Ask You Something

I ask a lot of questions. Some people don't really like that. For instance, one person, let's call them X, asked me if I wanted to go for dinner. It went kind of like this.

X: Do you want to go for dinner when I get off work?

Me: What time do you get off?

X: I am not sure. I am supposed to get off at 6 but I may stay later.

Me: Where do you want to go?

X: I don't know. Wherever.

Me: Are we going to walk or drive?

X: Grrr...why are you asking so many questions? I just wanted to go for dinner.

Okay. Let's stop for a minute. I have a good reason for asking all of these questions. For example. I get off at 5 and I want to take a run after work. Will I have time to go before we eat? If we are going at 6, I may try to get off early; if we are going at 8, I will probably stay until 5 and run before dinner. If we are going to walk, I may do a shorter run. If we are going for a large dinner as opposed to a light dinner, I might do a longer run.

But, I realize it may get a little annoying when I don't just say YES sometimes. But I want to be sure about what I am agreeing to before I agree! Otherwise sometimes plans end up not working out the right way.

For example, the other day my friend asked me if I wanted to go for a hike the next morning. I did want to go for a hike, but I also wanted to go for a run, and my original plan was to go for a run in the morning. I had friends coming over for drinks and food at 4 and I wanted to start getting the food and the house ready around 1 pm. So I asked her what time she wanted to hike. She said 9:00 am.

Normally I would ask: Does this mean leaving the house at nine, arriving at the trail head at nine, or starting the hike at nine? Where are we going? How long will we be hiking? But I have been scolded, so I didn't ask anything. In fact, I ASS-umed that the hike would be a couple of hours, which would leave me with enough time to go running, shower and start getting ready for my guests. 

The next day I got up around 7 but decided to wait for my run until after the hike, since if we were supposed to start hiking at 9 we would have to leave the house around 8:30. 8:30 rolled around and we weren't leaving. Was I allowed to ask questions now? I wasn't sure. I finally asked when we were leaving and was told that the person we were meeting was going to let us know when they were leaving the house and then we were going to leave the house. I don't really do well with these kind of time definitions.

We ended up leaving at 9:45, then waiting at the trail head and then to top it all off, the place we went for our "hike" was a paved, flat path with a ton of slow mo families with bikes and dogs. The pace was leisurely at best.

Then we went to brunch and the person we were with had a dog so we had to sit outside so we couldn't just take the first available table and I carpooled so I couldn't just leave and the whole time I am picturing my run getting shorter and shorter and then just withering away.

I got back home at 3. Did I mention that I had people coming over at 4?

I guess the moral of this story is...annoying or not, I am going to ask a million questions before saying yes to anything.

So, let me ask you something: do you care about the little details or are you more of a go with the flow kind of person?