Thursday, October 31, 2002 :::
Idiom of Idiots: “Well, Chuck, we went out there and gave a 110%”
(also titled: Impossible Percentages)
This goes out to all of the professional athletes. This is a special message to all the Generic Business Guys. To professional sports coaches, sports commentators, and sports writers. This is a tailored message to every person who has ever thought of their efforts and pursuits as something greater than they were and, as a measure of that effort, assigned it some impossible percentage.
Simple math is my favorite kind. If you worked eight hours of an eight hour work day, you have worked 100% of your work hours. But if you work, say, ten hours, guess what? You have worked 100% of a ten hour work day. You don’t get credit for what is normal or common place such as “eight hours is a typical workday”. You did not “give 125%”. If you had it within you by way of stamina or were forced in the name of circumstance, what you achieved represents your maximum output. “Potential output”, “historical output”, and “standard output” are all just variables that are mathematically impossible to define and do not belong in the equation anyway.
Percentages are intended to compare two numbers or variables to one another to gauge differences or changes in relation to each other. When speaking about exactly ONE item (and a non-numerical item at that) such as Effort, it is impossible to realistically calculate a percentage.
So, to you coaches and sports guys that “went out there and gave 110% to get that victory” I say this: the effort you expended in the pursuit of victory was adequate to secure said victory and the total amount of planning, execution, and exertion is a whole unto itself which equals 100%. Your opponents who lost didn’t lose as a result of “giving 90%” or some sub-100 output. What they gave was 100% of what they gave. See…it really is simple math.
::: posted by Mike at 2:52 PM
Wednesday, October 30, 2002 :::
Let Loose The Crakin!! (if that’s O.K….I mean, I don’t want to cause any trouble!)
By now we have all been beaten to death with talk about Iraq and pending military action. I know I am. In fact, when I heard that President Bush took some time on Monday to call Emmitt Smith and congratulate him on breaking the NFL all-time rushing record, the first thing I thought was “great, President Bush has found time between advertising a war no one gives a shit about and running the US economy into the fucking dirt with good ole’ Republican know-how to call a football player. Fan-fucking-tansic!”
For a while, TV was all things Sniper. We had Sniper updates and Sniper Profiles- all from “expert profilers” who turned out to be wrong, wrong, wrong- and we had interactive maps, education in short-range assault artillery, and even footage of housewives saying that they were scared to take their kids to school (everything they said touched with the preamble “I’m a mother…” like that somehow legitimizes or gives higher status to their opinion.) But anyway, it was better with a Sniper on the prowl. Not so much for the poor folks he shot, but for CNN who was even getting a little bored reporting the same non-news bullshit about Iraq.
But now the Sniper is caught and other than the media orgy where third-grade classmates talk about their intimate memories of the Sniper, that story is pretty much done. Now all there is to do is talk about the legal obstacles to be overcome when you have too many lynch mobs and only one neck. Oh, and letting the families of the victims get some much needed privacy. So it won’t be long until focus is placed back on that tired old dog, Iraq, and our president that fumbles around seeking permission to put it to sleep.
I often wonder if there will come a time in my life where I don’t equate situations- both great and small, social and personal- to scenes from the movie Clash of the Titans.
In one scene in particular, Zeus, played by the late great Laurence Oliver, tells Poseidon to lay waste to a city. For reasons that now escape me, Zeus was not pleased. Zeus wanted them to suffer, he wanted them to hurt, and he wanted them to die. So, Zeus turns to the master of the deep and he says, “Let Loose The Crakin”…the Crakin being a multi-armed, undersea-dwelling bringer of destruction. The important thing to note here is that Zeus didn’t ask for the pollsters to rate public sentiment. He didn’t debate and justify his plans with every half-rate god on Mt. Olympus. He didn’t even ask his wife’s permission. He just made it happen. He knew that there was ass that needed kicking and he let loose the dogs…or Crakin as it were.
Now I don’t think that Pres. Bush should have that kind of unilateral military authority to wage war on a whim, but I do wish we’d either fight or shut the hell up about it. All this talk about Iraq is going dull my mind, shorten my attention span, and possibly keep CNN from identifying and dwelling on the next big villainous thing.
Come on George…just let loose the fucking Crakin and let’s get on with business.
click here for the sound clip.
::: posted by Mike at 3:29 PM
Tuesday, October 15, 2002 :::
Critical Beauty
I had a conversation with a co-worker the other day that taught me something.
First, some details about the participants.
There was me…and her. I am, well, me. No further explanation needed. She is someone I barely know. We have had, all told, about 5 conversations over the near two years we have worked in the same building. Most of these conversations have been around mistaken identity or the hardships of finding love in this, the modern world. I won’t explain any further.
The conversation was about, believe it or not- as we work for IBM, computers. I had a report, she had a customer, and after little more than 3 minutes we established that my report would not help her learn anything about her customer. The exactness of my report’s inabilities was clear. But then my attention shifted to her as the individual rather than her as the co-worker.
Let me just say she is a pretty girl. No need for expanded or far-reaching adjectives or adjective-laden metaphors. She’s just a pretty girl. But I have always thought she ranked among the world’s worst caliber of pretty girl…the kind that knows she’s pretty and brings that as a term and condition of interaction and conversation. In the few times I have been around her I could feel her scanning me over, searching for indications, either through words or body language, that I accepted her terms and found her to be pretty. Traditionally she would not be what I would consider “my type”. What she found on her scans of me, I’ll never know.
I noticed she seemed out of step, not dialing into her normal sense of self, sidetracked. I asked if she was O.K. I asked out of concern. But I also asked because she is pretty and pretty has made me a victim more often than not. She explained briefly about a situation with a guy who had apparently done something. My lack of details is intentional. The short of it is he did this without having met her in the flesh. They talked on the telephone, or the internet, this friend of a friend, and they forged a bond. But when it came time to prove the concept of this anonymous relationship, something fell away.
The pretty girl explained to me that she was, while not saying the word hurt, hurt. She went on to say that if he actually laid eyes on her then he’d realize his mistake. If he saw her dressed up to the “going-out factor” he would collapse into a pile of sad rubble. That while she might look good here at work (something she was confident in), she was so much more a force to be reckoned with when not toning it down for us knuckleheads here at work.
My response was this: If it takes a guy seeing your beauty to realize you should be a priority, when he’s already had a chance to get you know you as a person, as a mind, then is this the kind of guy that you really want to make you a priority? She didn’t respond. The conversation ended.
After she was gone I thought a little about how critical her beauty was. About how very crucial it was to the definition of her self-concept. Being seen and celebrated for her mind, for her passions, for the things that transcended flesh, it was all secondary. If her initial terms and conditions were not met, her pretty not validated, nothing else mattered. As I thought about this I remember pitying the pretty. Aside from being pretty I think it important to note that on these 5, or however many, occasions we have spoken I really have seen an interesting girl behind the pretty. Maybe it is because I am married, maybe it’s because she is not “my type”, but whatever the reason, I can attest to life-signs behind the curtain of cosmetic shine.
I wonder what it is about the culture we live in that makes pretty the most important points worth scoring. Granted, that initial attraction has to be there, but it is never the sustainable power that propels our relationships forward.
I’ve never been pretty. I know this girl doesn’t think I am pretty. So I wonder what she will think when she realizes her best shot will be with unpretty guys like me who have the ability to look beyond and the courage to reject her terms and conditions.
But that’s not my problem.
::: posted by Mike at 12:46 PM
