Have you ever been looking forward to a nice, easy, Saturday afternoon, doing nothing but reading the paper and watching whatever happens to be on TV, only to have your most well thought out plans for laziness destroyed by a friend in need? Rides to the airport, helping somebody clean out their garage, and worse of all, moving, are things that define a friendship.

You wouldn’t ask that guy you see at the gym every couple days to pick you up at the airport, would you? Of course not. So, one the one hand, getting a call to do something horribly tedious and un-fun is a clear weekend killer, but it is also a remind that at least somebody counts you as a close friend (or a sucker).

I had just woken up, and was lying on my sofa, flipping through the channels when my cell phone went of. Since I recognized the number, (it wasn’t the IRS or an irate ex) I figured there wasn’t much risk in answering it. Oops.

My friend was having some problems in his backyard. He had gotten into a dispute, or a discussion, rather about some big tree. This big tree had some roots that were getting a little bit out of control, and they were starting to mess up their shared fence.

He and his neighbor had had the fence put in a few years ago, as the old one was nearly falling over. But the roots of this tree were stretching out under the fence into the neighbors hard. My friend’s backyard was all grass, but the neighbors was concrete, and he was worried (reasonably so) that the roots would damage not only their fence, but also his expensive concrete backyard.

So my friend request was to help dig out this root in his backyard, and stop it from spreading. The problem he was having was there were so many roots going all over the place, he didn’t know which was which. He didn’t want to kill the tree, as it was a really nice looking one, especially in spring.

I suppose the only good thing about this whole mess was that I didn’t have to take a shower or shave or anything before I went over to destroy his backyard.

We started digging, looking around, and sure enough, there were plenty of roots.

This was going to take some work. We were also going to need to get some more tools.

Roots can be an interesting topic, so long as you aren’t digging them up. Some trees have huge root networks that expand much further than the topside of the tree. Kind of like icebergs, some trees have most of their material below the ground, rather than above the ground.

From the perspective of a human, this doesn’t make sense. What good is a tree if most of it is underground? But from the perspective of the tree, it makes perfect sense. From a trees persepctive, it’s all about using whatever you have at your disposal to collect as many resources as possible to fulfill your objective.

And I suppose the objective of a tree is to live as long as it can, while making as many other trees as possible. So it stretches out its branches both above the ground, and below the ground to get as many resources as it can.

The fact that humans come along and put a tire swing on one of its branches is completely incidental.

Of course having roots is also quite limiting. You can very well get up and walk around with huge roots going several meters into the earth (unless you are one of trees from “Lord Of The Rings”)

Sometimes it’s best to cut your roots if they are giving you problems. Things that you used to depend on earlier may be a hindrance later on. Things that were originally built for safety can inhibit your freedom later on. The trick is to understand which roots are safe to cut, and which ones you should leave untouched.

This, of course, can take some digging, and an ability to take a step back and understand what it is that you are really after. And whether or not those roots are really giving you the benefits that you think, rather than just some imagination based on the past.

After a few hours, and a few trips to Home Depot (for digging tools I didn’t even know existed) we finally had all the roots identified, and had determined which one was threatening the fence, and the neighbor’s back yard. I turned out this particular root wasn’t nearly as deep as the rest, so cutting this wouldn’t cause any problems. There to be some big rock or something that had deflected the growth of this root several years ago. Otherwise it would have grown down, rather than out, like all the rest of the roots.

When we finally got the pizzas (yes, plural) after all that digging, it was just in time to watch some good movies on HBO.

And that’s how I spent my Saturday.

As I sat there, I wondered how in the world I had gotten into that situation. What had seemed like such a good idea had rapidly turned into a nightmare, and I was starting to become extremely desperate. At the very least I was going to end up in jail. My only question was for how many crimes. If I was lucky, none of the would be life sentences, but at the rate things were going, I wasn’t so sure.

“Dude, I got this great idea.” He said. The look on his face told me that he’d thought it through. He wasn’t the kind of guy who just came up with random ideas for the sake of listening to himself talk and watching the reactions of others. I know people like that, I’m sure you do to. They just spout off ideas, or thoughts, or comments, not because they are worth saying or doing, or even thinking about, but because the resultant conversations and arguments make them feel as if they are involved in something important.

Not this guy.

He rarely came up with a plan, or an idea, or a thought unless he’d carefully thought, or at the very least it was something he felt very good about on gut level. A few people have made the mistake of getting into an argument with this guy, and quickly realized that he has clearly thought through any objections to his proposal.

So when he says, “Dude, I got this great idea,” you usually stopped whatever you were doing and paid attention.

The plan seemed reasonable enough, and surprisingly, it only seemed illegal based on how you interpreted it. The worst-case scenario was that we’d get caught in the middle of the act, and we would have several plausible explanations for our behavior, all of which would be completely believable by the authorities.
It was pure genius. Best case, we’d make off like bandits, worse case, we’d get a talking-to and sent on our way. It’s one of those rare exploitations of events that only comes along once in a great while.

There was once a case several years ago of such an event. If you ever go to the racetrack, they have something called a “pick six.” If you correctly guess the winners of the first six races, you win quite a bit of money. It’s similar to a lottery, but the odds are completely different. Lottery numbers all have the same probability of coming up. Any six numbers have just as much probability of any other six numbers.

But at the races, if you pick six long shots, then you have a much slimmer chance of winning all six races. A long shot is a horse that nobody thinks has a chance of winning.

So the odds of picking the correct six horses vary greatly depending on the horses that are running. But just like many lotteries, if nobody wins one week, the prize money is carried over to the next week, and so on until somebody wins.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Once, several years ago in New Jersey, the amount of prize money grew to be higher than it would cost to bet on a pick six of all possible combinations of all horses in the first six races.

It was suddenly a sure thing bet. A guaranteed return on your money, in about three hours.

The only problem was, it would take considerable cash, and manpower, to bet all possible combinations. This was in the days before Internet betting, and even today this wouldn’t be possible over the Internet, as there are restrictions.

But for somebody with sufficient cash reserves, and manpower, this was no-brainer. And that is exactly what happened. On particular syndicate sent their workers out to all the places where you could make a bet, and they each had several different combinations of “pick six” horses.

Sure enough, one of them had a winning ticket, and the payout more than paid for the manpower and the expenditures.

They say a sure thing like this exists in the stock market, from time to time. When a stock price falls below a company’s book value, they say this is a fairly good investment to make. That is, when the number of shares, multiplied by the price per share, is less than the physical worth of the company, then it’s a bargain.

It would be like buying a brand new car for fifty percent below sticker price. Even if you drove it off the lot, and it depreciated twenty percent, you could drive right over to the next dealership, and sell it to them at a decent profit.

Of course, this involves some risk, and unless you are prepared to actually go to the company and collect some office furniture to recoup your losses, it may not be such a good investment strategy.

This is exactly how it sounded when my friend started off with his “Dude, I got this great idea.” The way he described it, we were going to make quite a bit of money in a short period of time.

Now, however, I was just hoping to get less than five years in prison.

My thoughts were interrupted by the crash of the glass, and the thud of the canisters hitting the floor behind us. It didn’t take long for the smoke to start burning my eyes and my nose. I looked to my sure thing friend for advice. His eyes said everything.

It’s funny how you can get so much information by a quick glance at somebody’s eyes. I wish I had this realization sooner, as his eyes were about twenty percent apologetic, and the rest, sixty percent determination, and twenty percent madness.

You ain’t getting me alive.

I shrugged. In for a penny, in for a pound.

We charged at the door, guns drawn and ready.

To be continued…

Once I knew this guy who was a well-respected businessman in his field. I’m not exactly sure what kind of field it was; it had something to do with manufacturing electronic parts or something. And to tell you the truth I’m not absolutely certain what his particular job was. Something to do with engineering the manufacturing process, from a human interaction standpoint.

Some manufacturing plants are completely automated, and there are only a few people needed. And even those people are more of monitors, or quality control inspectors than anything else. They make sure the machines are running smoothly, and the end product is what it is supposed to be. They don’t take part in the actual manufacturing.

One that comes to mind is the famous Hershey’s Kiss. It’s called kiss because the particularly machine part that leans over and deposits the small bit of chocolate on the conveyor belt looks as if it’s kissing the belt, hence the name.

I’m reminded of Lucy and Ethel trying desperately to keep up with the candy machine, but I digress.

The manufacturing plant my friend was in charge of was a blend of automatic and human interaction. There were many kinds of things that came in to play. Whether they should sit or stand how long they should work between breaks, what’s the best position to be in when working on these electronic parks. They were fairly small, so they needed to be pretty close.

Because the parts sold for quite a bit of money, the company was quite profitable, so the workers were paid quite a bit, as well as enjoying fairly competitive benefits. So there wasn’t much of an “us vs. them” attitude when it came to management. There was also a lot of profit sharing, so when the company made money, the line workers were pretty well compensated.

So naturally, whenever my friend thought of an idea that would improve productivity, and therefore their bottom line, he never had a shortage of workers who would “beta test” the new design or system.

One of the things that he found most helpful was to keep a completely open line of communication and information. He reported to the general manager, who wasn’t a techie, and who relied on him to maximize the productivity. And directly reporting to him were several line supervisors, who each in turn had several people reporting to them.

When he took over the job, several years ago, it was run in a more or less “top down” type of management system. The boss tells you what to do, and you do it, without question. This is what led to the company almost going bankrupt.

When my friend got involved, he wanted to work on the line himself, in every feasible position before even thinking about coming up with ways to improve productivity. The workers really respected that.

Later, he would meet with his supervisors, and explain in as much detail as he could what would help improve the bottom line. Several times he would take his supervisors to shows out of town to look at different manufacturing equipment to see if would help improve production.

The supervisors, in turn, would always be open to suggestions from those that reported to them. This was a particular industry that wasn’t health related, it was purely consumer driven, so none of the changes in manufacturing needed to meet any federal red tape regulations. So every time even the newest, least experienced workers had an idea, it was frequently implemented, at least on a beta testing level, within a day or two.

It’s fascinating when you think about it. A huge system of several different parts, all working together on the same goal. When you have open communication, and all your parts are congruent, then achieving your targets is very easy.

But when you use the top down style of management, and ignore what’s really going on down in the trenches, you run the risk of losing it all.

The interesting thing is how quickly you can switch from an inefficient system to a top of the line, highly efficient money making operation. Open the lines communication, get all your parts on board, and make sure that everybody knows that you’re all really after the same thing, and success is almost guaranteed.

Any coach knows that when all the players are working together for the good of the team, and not their own egos, you can accomplish great things. You put a bunch of superstars on the same team; you’re likely to do nearly as well as you could, as each team wants to be the star.

But you put a bunch of people together that have only above average talent, but are congruent, there’s not much that can stop you.

What conflicts do you have? Does part of you want something, but part of you wants something else? What happens when they realize they are both manifestations of the same thing?

Something to think about, especially if you ever can’t think of which choice to make. Let your parts have a meeting and see if they can work something out.

You’d be surprised what can happen.

Once I was on this backpacking trip with a friend of mine. We’d planned this trip out for a few weeks, and had been really looking forward to it. It wasn’t a loop trip, which meant that we had to find somebody to drop us off at the trailhead, so that when we came out a week later our car would be there. We had decided to hike over this pass that was relatively tough, so we had to get in shape physically.

We also had to plan for a bit of cross-country, off trail hiking. We only had so many days off of work, and the particular semi-loop we wanted to do was a bit of a stretch. It was feasible given our time frame, but we would have had to hike quite a few miles every day, which wouldn’t have given us much time for fishing.

Our guidebook listed a “shortcut” that cut across a small pass, and saved us about ten miles of hiking. It seemed, (like most things do) good enough on paper, so we figured we’d give it a go.

Only when we got to the “shortcut” it involved walking over this huge field of large boulders. And when I say huge field, I mean like three or football fields huge. And the boulders were between the size of your desk, and your car. And, it was slightly up hill. Not only that but every third or fourth boulder would “move” slightly when you stepped on it, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.

About a third of the way through this “shortcut,” I looked up to see my friend just barely within shouting distance ahead of me. Suddenly I started to feel anxious. What happened if I slipped on one of these unstable boulders and snapped my ankle? I might slip into a crevice between them and who knows how long before anybody found me? As I was carrying about a fifty-pound pack, each step was becoming more and more dangers. I looked up at my friend, and back down to the dirt trail below, which was still within view.

“Hey” I shouted. I waited. I shouted again. Finally my friend turned to look.

“I’m going around!” I wasn’t sure if he heard me or not, but I went back down toward the dirt trail. I wasn’t looking forward to hiking the extra ten miles around the next set up mountains, but it seemed better than possible snapping ankle.

What happened after that is something I’ll never forget.

Once I went on this date with a girl. It had taken me quite a while to get up the courage to ask her out. Finally I did, and she happily agreed. I figured I’d impress her with my culinary knowledge, and take her to a Vietnamese-French restaurant. The only place where I’d actually eaten snails, er, escargot. I had everything planned out. Next to this restaurant was a pretty decent cafe, and they were all within a few miles of her apartment. I had everything planned. I’d pick her up, take her to this nice restaurant, we’d walk over to the cafe, and I’d impress her with my stimulating conversation skills, and then take her home. If I were lucky she’d ask me in for a cup of coffee. (Whatever that means.)

I picked her up, told her all about how wonderful this restaurant was on the way there. Only when we got there, the place was gone. Burned to the ground. She looked at me with a, “now what?” look on her face.

I had this roommate in college who was a computer programmer. I always wondered why those guys would spend all night long programming, and typing in code. I never really understand how to program, despite taking a class in BASIC while I was in high school many years ago.

He explained that a programmer has to plan for all possible events, and come up with a way for the software to handle everything. He was trained well by his professor. He would write some code, present it to his prof, and the prof would do all kinds of things that he hadn’t expected, in order to crash the program. His particular favorite was to randomly type in as many keystrokes as possible, until the program just froze.

All the students in his class quickly learned that because you never know what is going to happen, you have to plan for everything, and then test it out. No matter how much you plan, there are still things that can come up that you didn’t expect, so you need to go back and program that into the software as well.

Biologists will say that the reason that the human species is so incredibly prolific is that we are incredibly flexible. You can travel to any remote corner of the world, any environment, any food source, and there’s a chance that humans have no only lived there, but thrived there. Caves, cliffs, houses made from ice, deserts, rainforests. We seem to have some incredibly rich and complex circuitry programmed into our collective human brain that makes us incredibly responsive to whatever happens.

An evolutionary biologist will tell you that just like my roommate kept presenting his computer program to his professor over and over again, every generation of humans has produced an iteration slightly better equipped than the previous.

A theologian or a deist will tell you our Creator endowed us with such incredible circuitry simply because that’s who She is.

Of course, my own personal circuitry seemed to be taking the night off, as I stared back at my date, for a while, and then just figured we’d skip the restaurant, and go straight to the café. They have food at café’s, right? The date didn’t come out as planned, in large part because I didn’t have a plan B, nor did I check with the restaurant (e.g. make reservations like any normal person would have), or at least drive by the place to make sure it was still there.

And when I came back down to the dirt trail, and started walking, it really started to sink in. I was all alone, in the middle of the wilderness, with no cell phone, and no way of communicating with anybody. Since we hadn’t planned on taking the long way around, we hadn’t purchased any maps or checked out any guidebooks for that particular area. I only had a couple of large mountain peaks as my guideline, and a trail that may or may not fork off into other trails. I basically had two large mountains to my left, that I had to walk around, and not only find the meadow that was between them, but find my friend who would be hopefully be waiting for me.

It took me about six hours to finally meet up with my friend again, and I was physically and emotionally exhausted. Luckily, the contour of the mountains and the meadow, and also the fact that there was a decent spring running up the middle made it fairly straightforward.

But during those six hours, I had some pretty interesting conversations with myself. Something I shall never forget.

Once there was this little armadillo. He had separated from his tribe, and was starting to get a bit worried. He wasn’t old enough to be out by himself after dark, but he was old enough to start feeling a little frustrated and anxious whenever his parents started to boss him around. So while he was getting a bit concerned, part of him kind of secretly relished the idea of facing the elements on his own for the night. He was an armadillo, after all, and I’m sure you know what that means.

Many people aren’t aware that armadillos tend to be loners, and not hang out in packs. They don’t hunt in packs, as they prefer to scavenge alone for various ground dwelling animals, like squirrels and small rabbits. Occasionally an armadillo will survive on only insects, but it much prefers the meaty taste of a ground squirrel, or even a house. (Although mice are the hardest to catch. They seem to have a sixth sense that keeps him just out of reach of the armadillo).

It wasn’t always like that. Back during the heyday of the armadillos’ evolutionary period, it had several different iterations of itself. For a while it was even capable of short flights, up to a hundred meters on occasion. But Mother Nature soon corrected herself, as the flying armadillo didn’t really have any advantage, from a hunter-gatherer standpoint. It was more of a passing fad than anything else.

But our hero of this particular tale was heading due east, away from the setting sun. This had been programmed into the animal’s instincts by Mother Nature herself, as it just made it easier to forage for food. They started out with the sun at their backs, and scavenged around until the sun hit its apex. When the sun was in front of them, they merely turned and headed back the other direction.

This, incidentally, why armadillos only live in areas near the equator. There used to be quite a large armadillo population in the north, but due to the angle of the rising and setting sun, they never quite headed back at the end of the day to the same spot. So for a while, armadillos seemed to migrate in huge arcs across the northern plains, but that was merely due to the structure of their environment. If you happened to build yourself a time machine, as well as a human armadillo communication device, you would likely find that the armadillos didn’t really have any idea what was going on. They just knew that when they went home every single night, somebody had moved their house. So every night they would have to build a new one, only to find the same thing happen the next day.

(Altough, one would tend to wonder why you should build such a device if you had the technology to do so. You may be better of curing cancer or something, rather than going into the past and interviewing armadillos)

So it makes perfect sense as to why this particular species of northern armadillo didn’t survive.

Back to our story.

So as this young armadillo was following his ever-lengthening shadow, he started seeing thing moving about him that he’d never seen before. These small creatures that looked like mice, but they could fly. And they flew in a strange pattern. They didn’t fly in straight lines like insects; they kind of fluttered about as if they couldn’t see where they were going.

He figured if they couldn’t see where they were going, it would be pretty easy to eat them. So he crept a couple of low flying ones that were close by, and just as he stretched out his mouth, they shrieked this really high-pitched screech, and fluttered out of the way.

Try as he might, and despite getting very close to these strange creatures, he couldn’t sink his jaws into them. It was maidenly frustrating.

Then he heard the voice from behind him:

“Young hunter. You will need to determine more stealth to catch your prey. Despite their seeming ineptness, those creatures are equipped with a guidance system much different than yours. If you want to catch them, you must enter their world. You must learn to see in the dark, and respond to sound, and not sight.”

He turned around, and saw just the faint shadow of whatever creature had spoken to him slither off into the darkness.

He turned, and watched all these delicious fluttering entities that so far had proved to be just out of his reach.

Darkness.

The armadillo closed his eyes, and began to listen for the creatures. He heard cacophony he’d never imagined before. The fluttering of their wings, the insects under his feet, the breeze through the cacti. Suddenly, instinctively, he leapt into the air, and sunk his deeply into a fluttering creature of the night.

It was delicious.

The lost armadillo of the day, whose ancestors had followed the sun in circles across the northern plains, was now a hunter of the night.

The other day I had one of those nights where things end up much different than you planned. I figured it be a night when you start off thinking you are going to go out, grab a bite to eat, maybe watch a few play of the game on TV at your local sports bar over a beer or two and call it a night. Sometimes, despite not having any plans on a Saturday, it still feels good to hit the sack early on Friday.

But, thirteen hours after my night had started, things didn’t look like they were going to slow up any bit. In fact, they seemed like they were just getting started.

I used to work with this guy that kept a religious schedule when it came to sleeping. He would wake up early during the weekday, and he was a subscriber to the idea of never sleeping in, even one minute later than normal, on the weekends. He thought that would completely ruin his sleep pattern, and make it much more difficult to “catch up” if he cheated.

I suppose that makes sense, but all that willpower you can seemingly muster every morning when the alarm goes off just isn’t there on a Saturday. I mean what’s wrong with hitting the snooze a few times?

Keeping a strict, routine, predictable schedule is important to a lot of people. I know folks who have gone to the same restaurant for years and only order on or two things. To them ordering even a different dessert is a stretch. There is plenty of marketing data that clearly indicates, as we get older, they are much less flexible in their thinking. For companies that rely on brand loyalty, that is a good thing.

But for new companies, or companies that are trying to launch a new product that is targeted toward an older market, this can be quite a tough sell. The trick is to make it seem like by choosing the new product, they will be holding fast to their old beliefs and habits.

This isn’t as hard as it seems at first, as it all gets back to your ability to leverage criteria. Many people have a criterion of familiarity. All you need to do is convince them of all the things about this new product that they are already familiar with, and it will make the decision to switch products, or start using a new product that much easier.

There has been a lot of research done that whatever it is that we value in any particular thing is not only largely subjective, but internally generated as well. The actual object, obviously, is not internally generated, but the feelings and ideas and beliefs we have about the object are. Recent studies have shown brain scans which suggest that up to 40% of ALL of our perceptions of the world are internally generated. That is we perceive something with one or more of our senses, and our brains only detect enough of whatever it is to fire off an internal memory of that particular object. Then the internal memory is referenced as much as possible. Just like a huge memory cache, in order to save on neural processing speed.

We take our brains for granted, but twenty percent of our energy goes to keeping our brains active. That’s a lot of energy, so it makes sense to have some kind of built in system to maximize its efficiency.

So if you’d like to convince somebody that something that they’ve never seen before is actually quite familiar to them, you just need to figure out what their criteria are for that particular thing. It’s just matter of developing enough rapport to be able to elicit sufficient information regarding that internal representation, of whatever it is, and then showing them that the new object fits that representation just as well, or even better, than the old one.

When I used to sell cars, I was amazed at how well some of the salespeople would “switch” customers from the car they thought they wanted, to one that was available. And it wasn’t any kind of strong-arm persuasion tactic. I sat in, as a trainee, on some of these conversations between salesperson and customer. It was almost as if the salesperson was simply helping the customer come to the conclusion that the other car (the one they were “switched” to) was actually a much better choice for them. And they always allowed the customer to believe that it was all their decision, and the salesperson was just there to help them fill out the paperwork.

Personally, though, no matter how much I intellectually know that waking up at the same time every day makes much more sense, I still have developed sufficient willpower to go to sleep at the same time on a Friday night, let alone wake up at the same time on Saturday. Maybe I just need to persuade myself that waking up early on Saturday fulfills the same criteria as staying up late on Friday, so I can get some better sleep on the weekends.

But by the time Saturday afternoon rolled around, and I realized that I was going on more than twenty four hours without any sleep, the fact we were all at the amusement park with those foreign exchange students let met to pretty much give up on anything turning out normal that weekend. My two drinks and make it an early night had gone down in serious flames, and I had given in to the energy of the moment. And what happened after that was what really made me realize something needed to be done.

But that is for another story.

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The other day I was talking to a friend of mine from high school about this problem that she’s been having with her next-door neighbor and her daughter. She thinks that because they are not as quiet as they used to be, then that means that something has happened, and she is taking it personally.

I remember reading something about that, when somebody has certain issues, and there is some kind of unfavorable change in the environment, people can sometimes take it personally, and assume it was something they did, or worse, assume it is another example of them always getting the short end of the stick.

Like once I had this friend, and we were waiting in line to get our food at this fast food place. She had number seventeen, and they called numbers fifteen, sixteen, and then eighteen. She looked discouragingly at her number and mumbled something about things like this always happening to her.

Of course, if you were to do an engineering analysis of the restaurant, the restaurant staff, and the time and resources required to produce each order, and then compared that to orders number fifteen through eighteen, you very well may draw the conclusion that order number seventeen was the most labor and resource intensive (e.g. double bacon cheeseburger, extra pickles with well done fries, no salt). It would then be completely logical (especially if you were waiting in line with Mr. Spock) to expect order number seventeen to take longer than the rest.

This extremely common situation is made worse by the idea that people have about what the world “should” be like. Restaurants “should” always give out the food in the order that it was ordered.

Then you open up a whole can of worms from the restaurants perspective. Should they always give out the order numbers sequentially, no matter how long each individual order takes? What about somebody like my friend who ordered a pretty specific order, and somebody right after her that ordered something simple, like a cheeseburger and fries combo? Do you hold up the line in order to make sure your orders are in order in order to not offend those orders behind her? Or do you try the best you can, and take a broader approach, and work as efficiently and quickly as you can in order to please as many customers as possible?

Sometimes when I’m at the supermarket, and there is a bunch of people waiting in line, and the next checker over opens up. Sometimes he or she will shout out “I can help whoever is next,” which of course leads to a brief period of social anarchy of biblical proportions, where the first will become last and the last will become first. Especially if the last isn’t shy about throwing some elbows in order to secure a first in line position in the newly opened check stand.

Then there are other, (usually older) more experienced checkers who make an effort to actually walk over to the next person in line, and single them out to be first in the next line. This usually results in a much more calm transition, as people are prone to accept the new checker’s authority on the situation, and follow suit. It’s not uncommon to see strangers checking with each other to see who is going to go over to the next checker, and who is going to stay in the current line.

I’ve never worked at a supermarket, and I don’t know if they have a policy for how to handle such a situation, but it just seems that for everybody involved, ensuring an orderly transition from one long line to two shorter ones is much better than eliciting some social anarchy.

I remember reading a study done a number of years ago regarding line psychology. People were presented with two options, at a hypothetical fast food restaurant. Option one is you walk into the place, and choose between four open registers. Whatever line you choose, you’ve got to stick with it no matter how slow it moves. (Of course, Murphy’s Law dictates that no matter which line you choose, it will be the slowest.)

Option two is one gigantic queue, where you line up like for an amusement park ride, or at the bank. Then whoever is next, can just say “next!” and since there is only one line, whoever is next, is next. This seems to be the most preferred by businesses, as it takes away the problem of dealing with line jumpers and how to handle the situation of a newly opened register.

But it is least favored among customers, as it completely takes away any choice they may have when they walk into the place. It gives the impression of being herded like cattle, something people don’t particularly enjoy on their lunch break. It also makes it seem that you will be waiting longer, despite numerous studies that show you actually will have less of a wait in a general queue than when you have to choose your own line.

Push may come to shove when you are forced to decide which is important, personal choice and freedom, or efficiency, even if the efficiency is customer oriented, as it gets them in and out quicker.

Often times, we prefer the illusion of choice even when, in the long run, having a choice means waiting longer, despite the length of the wait being the number one criterion for making the choice in the first place.

Quite a paradox, that.

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Once there was this guy who lived in the sewer. He didn’t really mind living in the sewer, as it allowed him to live a life free from the worries of most day-to-day frustrations and anxieties. He didn’t have much money, but he didn’t really need anything.

This particular sewer that he lived in wasn’t really a sewer, per se, it was a large stretch of pipe that led out to a river, which was about a mile from the ocean. Up the river were a couple of industrial plants, and had been built specifically so they could dump their toxic industrial waste in the river. The factories had been built well before any EPA rules had specifically forbid the dumping of sewage into the river, but one has to wonder about the foresight of somebody that would base part of their business plan on the ability to continually pollute a natural resource.

This particular pipe had also been built to dump raw sewage directly into the river, but the same laws which precluded the plant to dump toxic waste into the river also precluded the local town to figure out another way to deal with their waste.

So as it stood, the large pipe, which was about a half a mile long, hadn’t been used in several years, and had dried considerably. There were a few storm drains that led into he pipe, and the central character of this story had lived in the sewer long enough, and had learned to read the weather well enough to prepare for the rise in water.

The area where this all took place didn’t see much rainfall, well below average, so this guy didn’t have to worry about his home flooding too often. And since he learned long ago to stay away from the bottle, he wasn’t in any danger of passing out and waking up floating out in the middle of the ocean somewhere. Contrary to what you’d expect, he was a pretty together bum, and put a good deal of thought into planning for the future. His future.

Our tale begins when he was out a night scavenging for food. He knew which were the good spots, which restaurants had decent leftovers in their dumpster. This was getting harder and harder, as many restaurants participated in programs that shared their food with the needy. Somebody from the local soup kitchen would come around and collect the leftovers, every night, so it was getting harder and harder for him to find unused food portions in the dumpsters.

You may be thinking that he could easily go straight to the source, the food kitchens themselves, but he learned that nothing was free. They all had their own philosophy and ideas about how a homeless man should be living his life. After about a week of free food, they grew comfortable enough with him to try and “counsel” him, and help him to “find a job,” so he could get a “decent place to live.”

As soon as they started in on that kind of helpful advice, he quickly found himself scavenging for his own food again, and heading back to his underground sanctuary.

As he was dumpster diving behind the Nigerian delicatessen (they were fairly new in town, and hadn’t been convinced by the local charity to give their leftover food yet) and found quite a bit of bread and cheese that were only a few days past their expiration date. Being a firm believer that expiration dates were only a recommendation, and not a hard and fast rule, he realized he hit the jackpot.

He went back home, and made himself a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches. If you’re wondering how a bum living in an abandoned underground sewer can make grilled cheese sandwiches, don’t fret. He had quite a setup, an area with a bed, and a couple of mattresses. A barbecue, and a few pots and pans that he used occasionally to cook with. He wasn’t your stereotypical bum that cooked an open can of beans on the fire. He had done a lot of work to make his home livable and comfortable. And the most interesting part was how quickly he could move everything about the water line at a moments notice.

But after he’d eaten a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches, he started feeling funny. Not, “I ate some bad food,” funny, but funny, funny. Not normal, funny. Something is really wrong with reality, funny. He started to see double, and his mouth and lips began to swell. He tried to sleep it off, but no use.

When he woke up in the next morning, his lips and tongue had returned to their normal size but his mind was completely frazzled. He still could think the same thoughts that he used to think, at least that’s what he remembered thinking when he woke up, but the thoughts he used to connect to things were different. Things that used to cause him fear now caused him to feel peaceful and tranquil. Those things that he never gave a second thought to now terrified him beyond measure.

Like when you are sitting there looking at this, and all of a sudden you feel you’ve been misled, or you’ve allowed yourself to be misled, and you are finally seeing things for the first time. You may look around and see the same things, but they take on completely different meaning. As if you are finally starting to realize what it’s really all about.

He decided to go back to the source and see if they could help. He would never have considered even making eye contact with the owner of a restaurant whose dumpster he had violated the night before, but today it just seemed like the natural thing to do.

He made his way back to the Nigerian delicatessen, and was surprised when they seemed to be expecting him.

“How are you old friend? You have finally come home!” A very large man said to him in heavily accented English when he walked in the front.

Old friend? Wasn’t this a new restaurant?

He found himself returning the embrace, first a little tentatively, and then slowly with more and more willingness.

“Please, tell us what you have learned here.” The large man asked him.

While he didn’t really understand the question, he found himself answering. And his answers astonished him. Not just their content, but the way in which they seemed to be coming from another person that he was watching across the room. Slowly but surely, this objective viewpoint slowly melted back into a subjective experience as he finally remembered everything. Who he was, where he came from, and what he had learned over the years. It felt good. Really good.

He was home again. It was time for the next phase. And it felt wonderful.

To be continued….

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So what do you do when you suddenly find yourself lost? That’s what happened to me once. I heard from a friend of a friend about this magnificent party, and he’d heard from another friend some convoluted directions to get there. Both of us, and the friend, had only been living in the area for a few weeks, so it was pretty obvious what was going to happen. They were going to go straight after work, which was about 6 PM, while I had to work until a couple hours later.

I remembered the directions as best as I could, and decided I’d figure out how to get there on my own. It didn’t take long before I had no idea where I was, no idea where I came from, and no idea how to get back home.

I had a really interesting experience a couple of weeks ago. I had just moved to a new city, and a new apartment. I mean new for me, as well as a new building. Everything was new and modern and really cool. I had spent a few hours driving to this new town from my old town, which involved driving over this huge bridge (several miles long) since my previous apartment was on this big island. A really big island.

So there I was, about to drift off to sleep, when an idea hit me. I had spend all day packing moving, unpacking and setting things up in my new place, I looked around at my new familiar surroundings, and I predicted I would wake up in the morning and experience a few moments of absolute disorientation. When you look around and for brief moment, you don’t know where you are, how you got there, or the last few things that happened before you found yourself in your particular situation.

That has only happened to me a couple times, all after waking up in a strange place. Probably the most pronounced event was a night of heavy, um, entertainment after a Who concert. I woke up in my friends house, and for about five or ten seconds (which is a long time to have no clue where you are or how you got there) of complete discombobulation.

But as I lay in my apartment a couple of weeks ago, I looked around at my new furnishings, and actually predicted I would wake up in the morning and draw a complete blank for the first few moments.

And when I woke up, just as I thought, I drew a complete blank. But here’s the cool part: Before I remembered where I was and how I got there (moving and driving over the bridge) I remembered predicting that I wouldn’t remember, only then did I remember everything else.

It was like back in the old days of when they had to bootstrap the first computers. They had these giant machines that ran off of punch cards, and they had no memory at all. They didn’t have enough memory to turn on all their systems.

So the guy who was using the computer had to feed it a punch card that was only to tell the computer how to turn itself on and get started, and how to read the other punch cards. Once that “memory” was loaded into the computer, then you could stick other, more complicated, punch cards into the machine so it could finally be able to do what you wanted it to.

We take all that for granted, as all of our computers today are pre programmed with complex operating systems and software that makes virtually every machine plug and play. There’s a reason Bill Gates is one of the richest dudes on the planet.

That was a truly odd sensation, waking up in a strange looking around in complete and utter cluelessness, and then remembering that I wasn’t going to remember anything, and then starting to remember everything else.

And when I finally figured out enough to back track to someplace familiar, I was able to use that familiarity to backtrack to a road that I actually knew. And from there finding my way was home was easy. I had given up on going to the party (which I later heard wasn’t all that exciting, anyway) long ago.

No matter how far off track you get, your brain will always find ways to get back to what is familiar. That seems to be an underlying prime directive of our brains. Familiarity.

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I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday, and I noticed something interesting about her speech. She had always spoken like that, but I hadn’t talked to her in quite a while. Last time we spoke was before I had become interested in language, having read several books on linguistics and other interesting tricks of language, most notably books by Pinker, Lakoff, and Grinder/Bandler.

The thing I noticed now, that I didn’t notice before was her heavy use of indirect speech. For example, I would say “A,” and she would then think “Because of A, then B,” with “B” being something that didn’t sound like such a good thing. But because she didn’t want to (either consciously or unconsciously) blurt right out “B!” She would always hide it behind layers of presuppositions and vague references.

For example, she would mention wanting more money at work, and I would suggest asking her boss for a raise. Instead of saying the obvious “If I ask for a raise, he’ll say no, and think less of me for asking.”

Which is a common enough fear, and generally the immediate reaction of most people when thinking about asking for a raise. But instead of blurting that right out, she’d say something like:

“I’m not sure if I have the presence of mind right now to think of what would happen if I were to do that.”

Which sounds innocent enough, until you unpack that seemingly simple statement and see what she’s really saying:

She is assuming that “presence of mind,” (whatever that is) is something that is difficult to identify, as she’s not sure if she has it or not.

Something called “presence of mind,” is required to understand the result of a request for more money.

“If I were to do that,” is stated as a second conditional. A first conditional is an “if..then” statement using the present tense, which presumes it is something that is likely to occur.

If it rains, I will get wet.
If I spend my money, I won’t have any.
If I drive too fast, I may get a ticket.

While the second conditional, with the past tense, is used for things that we don’t expect will happen, or are impossible.

If I asked my boss for a raise, he would say no.
If I saw a UFO, I would run.

So in response to a suggestion to ask for more money, she hides her “no, I’m too afraid” behind about three layers of linguistic protection.

If you’ve ever listened to a politician speak, you can tell right away that there speech is usually filled with layers and layers of vague ambiguity, so nobody can ever pin them down on what they said, if things go wrong, and if things go right, they can claim they had something to do with it.

It’s no wonder the joke, “how do you tell a politician is lying – when his lips are moving,” is so funny.

In one of the aforementioned books, Pinker was talking about how in societies where they have a history of class distinction, where upper class people could legally kill lower class people, (or other upper class people if they situation warranted it) they have developed a very polite level of speech, which can exist hundreds of years after the threat of violence.

If you were talking to some guy that was carrying weapons, and by offending him you risked getting your head slice off, you’d quickly learn to speak politely. It doesn’t take long for such a society to develop polite language. The American South is one such example. If you said the wrong thing to the wrong person, he would demand “Satisfaction,” and you’d have a gunfight at twenty paces on your hands.

Those that study linguistics on a much deeper evolutionary level suggest that all indirect speech has its roots in ancient fears of immediate reprisals. It doesn’t sound dangerous in the least to ask your boss for a raise, at least not from the standpoint of physical violence, but nevertheless, those feelings of fear cause us to hide our real feelings beneath several layers of “politeness” and vague ambiguity.

There is a fascinating book called “Mean Genes,” which illustrates all the ways that our automatic impulses that helped us immensely in our evolutionary past can be a real pain in the you-know-what in modern society. Stuffing our face until we can’t move when we are in the presence of food is one example that you can see everywhere you look in modern western society.

In the past, the several thousand year ago past, that impulse was beneficial. People would go several days without food, and when they finally got some, all other concerns were put on the back burner, and it was time to eat until the food was gone.

Not so helpful when you pass by three McDonalds, two Dunkin Donuts and a Bakery on the way to work every morning.

Of course, the great hope of modern humankind is to rise above our evolutionary based fears, and the ability to use our rational, conscious minds to think our ways around those pesky impulses to plan our future, instead of letting our impulses plan it for us.

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