Archives for August 2008

I was sitting between two pre-teens, one eight, one maybe 10, on Sunday evening, Aug. 3, the day I realized that airline travel in the U.S. was over.

Their grandmother, on the window, explained to me apologetically:

* She booked this trip in May.

* The stupid airline split the kids up for some reason, putting Ten in the center seat next to her, Eight across the row.

* Grandma had called and asked the airline to switch the seats, but the airline refused (even though she herself is a flight attendant [for another airline] {which proudly she showed off by inappropriately using lots of highfalutin references to "the aircraft" and "air pockets" and the flight attendants’ "final walk through"}).

* And no, unfortunately, Eight didn’t want to switch with me so the girls could sit together, because Eight wanted to hold the baby of the woman in the center seat, next to her.

I am "Sir" when Gramdma is apologizing to me directly for having to pass back and forth food, pillows, tea packets, drinks, a stuffed monkey, a Hollywood gossip magazine. I am "the Gentleman"–and sometimes "the poor Gentleman"–when grandma is noisily scolding one or both of the girls for bumping me, poking me, jostling me or pressing me into service gratuitously as a messenger.

I read The New York Times Sunday magazine with a comical fierceness, and maintain a stoic politeness. As if being placed at the center of this new family is no big deal, even for a man who is going to be quizzed upon landing on the contents of a magazine. I smile occasionally but I do not say that I have a daughter myself.

Early in the flight, Grandma has apparently tallied up my behaviors, run them against her flight attendant’s Remembered Customer Database and held the whole information collection up against my short haircut. She asks me, "Sir, are you in the military? Well, you just seem like military personnel."

The girls are … well, when the flight attendant informs me that I cannot get even a glass of water without paying, Ten whispers in my ear, "Things are getting so expensive these days!" I pretend not to hear. She taps me on the arm and repeats: "You know, things are getting so expensive these days!"

"Yes," I agree. "They are."

At the flight’s halfway point, the girls switch seats, Ten pushing past to see the baby, Eight hopping over my lap to sit beside Grandma.

"He’s so patient," Grandma says by way of apologizing for the hassle.

The girls are patient, too–with their Grandma’s constant nudging not to bite their nails, asking whether they’re finished with their soda and ready to put it away, wondering if they’d like a vanilla wafer.

Eight is complaining about her new seating assignment, and craning her neck over my book–I’ve proofread the magazine by now–to jealously count the joys that Ten is having with the baby. Probably to interrupt Ten’s conversation with the baby’s mother, Eight asks once again for the gossip magazine, which has now crossed over the aisle at least four times.

"Come on, girls, sit still!" Grandma says. She bellows it, because she’s got her headphones on to watch the in-flight movie, Tales of Narnia. "This guy’s going to throw you out the window!"

"Come on, girls, behave! This gentleman’s doing his best not to knock your head off!"

"Don’t hit him or I will spank you!"

"Sit still! The Gentleman’s right next to you. You guys have been up and down, up and down. I’m getting a little aggravated."

And then on the ground, more recrimination. "You were making this poor man jump up and down like a yo-yo!"

I’m on my way down the aisle, fairly pushing people out of the way to escape back into the world outside Modern Airline Travel, where I still, occasionally, manage to be something other than a "poor Gentelman," but the Eight and Ten don’t get away so easy. The last thing I hear as I sprint up the jetway is, "Hurry up, girls, these people want to deplane!"

An "expert," in the U.S., is someone who we blame for not having solutions to our impossible problems.

Think of the earnest nitwit who at the end of every communication conference presentation, stands and thanks the speaker for all the neat ideas. And then asks how the speaker would pull off such fancy tricks without any management support, without a budget and with an apathetic, multilingual workforce spread out over 58 countries and 14 time zones and without access to computers.

The other day that earnest nitwit was me.

I interrupted the E.B. White-like life of farming, reading and writing led by Jerry Tarver—retired rhetoric professor and teacher of thousands of speechwriters their craft—by forwarding him the e-mail of a communicator who wanted an authoritative "source" for the old rhetorical "rule of threes."

Don’t blame the e-mailer—she was preparing for a management presentation, and anticipating some lunkhead asking, "Well who wrote the rule of three, anyhoo?" She wanted an easy answer.

No: Blame me, for forwarding this to Jerry instead of answering it myself. And credit Jerry, who simultaneously slapped down the question and solved the questioner’s problem:

"As I understand it," he began, "___ wants to argue that a presentation should have only three points and is looking for a source to back up her position. Alas, if she were to find such a source why would she (or her audience) have any confidence in it?  The answer to the question can come from (1) the authority of an expert’s opinion or (2) social science research producing data to show the limits of memory and retention.

"Neither of these could supply a definite answer because there are too many variables.  If Aristotle recommended using only three points, how would he know any better than ___ what is best for a given business presentation?  Social science studies testing such theories are done by junior professors seeking promotions and their test subjects are college students.  The results are a load of scholarly crap."

Of course, the rule of three does have its roots, Jerry acknowledged. But they’re not in the number of points to make in a speech; instead, they’re in language and rhythym:

"Aristotle did say that speech should borrow the rhythm, but not the meter, of poetry because a smooth rhythm is satisfying to the ear.  So, we get Shakespeare’s ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’ and Caesar’s ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ …  The power of rhythm created ‘wine, women and song,’ when in fact wine and women would be quite enough.  Churchill, at his best, offered the British people, ‘Blood, toil, tears and sweat,’ but the power of rhythm reduced it to the much less satisfactory ‘blood, sweat ‘n tears.’"

And then, after dismantling the premise, Jerry concluded by more or less writing a more reasonable presentation himself:

"There’s nothing wrong with using three points in a given case, and generally my subjective judgment is that two to four points is about right.  If we could operate from a principle rather than a rule, we would want presenters not to overwhelm listeners with more ideas than they can digest (always remembering how smart are the  listeners; how complicated are the ideas).  If the subject demands ten points you either use ten points or you restrict the scope of the subject. You can search the Bible in vain for the story of
Moses and the three commandments. …

"Finally, I am not certain why an authority or a study is needed for ___ to argue for limiting the number of points.  She can flatly state her own opinion, she can point to examples of presentations that failed because of two many points or to examples of the use of limited points that stick in the memory (Stop.  Look.   And Listen. No telling how many little kids’ lives have been saved with that one.)

"Communication is too complicated to be ruled in. (Just consider the rule against using parenthetical expressions, which I have always assumed was invented by someone with deep psychological problems.)"

This is how experts have to respond to questions—patiently, humorously and above all, expertly.

Thanks, Jerry.

Trying to work up some old-fashioned outrage this morning reading the Wall Street Journal story about how Wal-Mart is sending HR mopes to tell managers that if the Democrats win in November, unions will come in and everything will go to shit.

But I found myself scratching my head instead of pounding the table.

Let’s see: Wal-Mart has about a million employees in the U.S. Spread across 50 states, so they average out to roughly 20,000 per. Now what percentage of those employees—and Wal-Mart’ll have to reach them cleverly, as it’s illegal for companies to electioneer to their hourly workers—are going to be moved by their employer’s political persuasion? Super-optimistically speaking, maybe a thousand in a single state?

Is Wal-Mart so strategically keen to keep the union out that it’s occupying hundreds of HR staffers to conduct these mandatory meetings and condemning the PR staff to a week in the bunker and marring its new green Sustainability Suit, all for a few hundred votes in a few important states?

Or are we maybe dealing with something a little less rational here?