Cedar’s Furniture and Appliance is a chain of five stores, two located in Youngstown, two in Akron, and one in Cleveland. Cedar’s main office is in Akron. Jane Pyle is the office manager at the main office. She supervises four word processing operators. Three of Pyle’s employees are efficient and thorough. She tells them what she wants done once, and it is done. However, the fourth employee, Harriet Enders, seems to get little done right. She finishes her daily work, but she frequently has to redo it, thus putting an extra burden on the other three operators. They have to make up the work Enders hasn’t time for because she is redoing her original work. The other three employees are beginning to complain to Pyle about the problem. Pyle doesn’t want to terminate Enders because Pyle knows her subordinate can be a hard worker. When she does follow directions, Enders is the first of the four word processing operators to finish. The office manager wonders why Enders doesn’t understand directions while the other three people always seem to. She is almost sure that, although Enders is hearing, she is not listening. Enders’s problem is preventing the office work from running smoothly.

1. Write the dialogue Pyle can use to open the discussion with Enders about this problem.

2. What environmental factors might be responsible for Enders’s difficulty in listening?