When people my age are asked for advice and wisdom about navigating life, they often respond with exercise and diet recommendations, admonitions to “avoid sweating the small stuff” or “stop and smell the roses,” or thoughts about the advantages of spending money wisely and getting a good education.
I have a different take.
I’ve found that my greatest strategy in life has been to feign confusion.
It gets me out of a lot of difficult situations.
Mind you, I’m frequently bewildered anyway, so it’s not a stretch for me to appear confused. But at times it’s a ploy. And that was the case when I got in trouble at work for listening to the baseball steroid hearings.
On March 17, 2005, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held an 11-hour hearing into allegations of steroid use among Major League ballplayers.
At that time I was an employee of the Judicial Council of California, and I started work at 7 a.m., which coincided with the 10 a.m. EST start time of the hearing. It should go without saying that as a fanatical sports fan, as well as a stickler about law and order, I absolutely needed to listen to that testimony! So I found the live audio online, plugged in my headphones, and happily began my workday.
And what a bonanza the inquiry proved to be.
Jose Canseco, one of the homer-hitting “Bash Brothers” for the Oakland A’s, had just written Juiced, a book detailing the rampant reliance on steroids among MLB ballplayers; he freely admitted his guilt and subsequently asked for, but didn’t get, immunity. The other Bash Brother, Mark McGwire, refused to address the topic, claiming that he didn’t want “to discuss the past”; a couple of years later, though, he admitted his drug use in an interview with Bob Costas. The Orioles’ Rafael Palmeiro vehemently denied using drugs but tested positive for steroids shortly thereafter and was out of baseball before the end of the season. Curt Schilling – the hero with the bloody sock who had pitched the Red Sox to a playoff victory against the Yankees the previous year – had been an ardent critic of steroids but softened his stance during the hearing and accused Canseco of writing his book merely for money and fame. Barry Bonds of my hometown Giants wasn’t called to testify, for reasons too complicated and questionable to explain here, but let’s face it – he was most likely one of the biggest steroid users ever. Allegedly.
In any case, the hearing – as much of a circus as it was – did prompt Major Leage baseball to greatly strengthen its steroid policy and implement mandatory testing.
The next morning at work, I got a call from a woman in the Information Services division. I knew her. She was a good person, but unfortunately power had gone to her head.
“Hi, Paula. How’s it going?”
I was completely unsuspecting. I thought she was probably calling about a computer issue.
“I’m wondering what you were doing online yesterday,” she continued.
Uh-oh. I sensed trouble and had to think clearly.
“Oh, I was listening to that terrific baseball hearing,” I chirped, brightly.
“Well, was it work-related?” she asked, undoubtedly knowing it was not.
“No,” I answered, still upbeat. “I had it on in the background while I was working.”
“Well, you were using up almost all of our bandwidth,” she sniped, accusingly. “You can’t do that.”
And that’s when I decided to feign confusion.
“Bandwidth? Huh?? What the heck is bandwidth?” I answered.
I knew full well what bandwidth was. This was before smartphones, and before everyone on the planet had the capability of posting photos and videos. But I had already created an intricate website for my rock band and uploaded dozens of videos in a complex process that involved my knowing about codecs and compression and all kinds of streaming techniques. I also knew that if my rinky-dink home-based connectivity could handle multiple large video clips, the Judicial Council of California sure as heck could handle streaming audio from its massive system.
So I decided to keep asking questions:
“How wide is bandwidth?”
“Did I use bandwidth personally, or did the government use it?”
“What is a stream?”
“It’s good to always use headphones, right?”
“Was my computer misbehaving in some way?”
Notice that I didn’t lie about anything. Basically, I just threw her into an ever-widening maelstrom of nonsensical questions.
I suppose this technique is a bit like “act now and ask for forgiveness later,” but I truly didn’t know that I had committed an offense. And rather than ask for forgiveness, I just pretended I had no earthly idea what my accuser was saying.
In the end, I simply exhausted her, and she gave up. But not before one last word of warning: “If this happens again, I’m going to have HR put something in your personnel file.”
Really? I’d been at the agency for nearly two decades. I’d have loved to have seen that massive smudge on my record.
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And so, my friends, my advice is simple. If you find yourself in a thorny and uncomfortable situation, avoid indignation. Avoid retribution. And, in many cases, even avoid reasonable debate. Just feign confusion. It’s pleasant, it’s cheery, it’s disarming, and it confuses the heck out of people. Then walk away with an internal wink.
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Due to popular demand, I am including, at the end of each blog post, the latest random diary entries that I’ve been posting on Facebook for “Throwback Thursday.” These are all taken absolutely verbatim from the lengthy diaries I kept between 1970 and 1987.
April 23, 1978 [age 22]:
“I did no work on my Lit project today, mainly because Kati asked if I wanted to go to a Giants game, and I readily agreed. We paid the $1 general admission and made history – it was the largest crowd ever to attend a baseball game in the Bay Area! I had three glasses of beer. When we left to drive back, I had to go to the bathroom so bad that I left Kati in the line of cars trying to get out of the parking lot and walked across the street to a park. My bladder almost blew up. The door was locked but as I was looking at it in despair some cute guy suddenly came from behind me and pried it open for me in 5 seconds without me even asking!! He didn’t say a word and was like an apparition! When I got back, Kati was still in the exact same place in the parking lot.”
May 2, 1978 [age 22]:
“It hit me today that what I really want to do when I graduate is learn how to be a human being – how to wear clothes & makeup & do my hair, how to cook and do many of the ordinary housekeeping chores I still haven’t learned to do. I need to learn how to sew. Or at least MEND!”
May 17, 1978 [age 22]:
“My final in my ‘Nature of Language’ class was absurdly hard today. The class was furious and screaming. But I just think I was able to bullshit at a higher level than most other people.”
May 28, 1978 [age 22]:
“I’ve been considering writing an essay entitled ‘On Bullshit,’ because lately I’ve been so soured by education that I simply cannot wait to put in my one last semester and get out of it. I got my Faulkner essays back, both of them with A’s on them, even though they were undeserving and poorly written. Then I realized how much bullshit we amass in our college years. Literary analysis is primarily b.s. because I have learned nothing from it but have simply always had the knack of completely fabricating seemingly feasible ideas about authors’ intentions. How useless! I love American Lit simply for the experiences I live vicariously. The same with film – I don’t care about Fellini or Eisenstein or neorealism or any of that; all I know is that I love ‘Easy Rider’ because two guys zoom ’cross-country on motorcycles, and I love ‘The General’ because it makes me laugh so hard. And by the way, everyone in the Film Dept. is adamant that we always say ‘film’ – never ‘movies’. Come on!”
June 4, 1978 [age 22]: [I’d entered a writing contest in San Jose regarding the contributions of Italian-Americans to the United States]
“I won! I won I won I won! Dad and I stood outside City Hall this afternoon as the Italian-Americans of the community, plus a few assorted politicians like Rod Diridon (i) and Sen. Jerry Smith, opened up Italian-American week with a flag-raising, a eulogy to the late Italian President Moro, and then the announcement of the winners. I almost cried and I think Dad did, too. . . . [Then on July 31, 1978:] I went to the Italian-American dinner tonight so that I could be ‘presented to the public’ and receive my money. I was nervous and trying to memorize an Italian line in the event of a speech, plus I was drinking like a fish, but as it turns out, we had to only go onstage and line up. Judge Panelli, one of the essay judges [who later became a CA Supreme Court justice], said that it brought tears to his eyes and he tried to read it to his relatives three times, and three times he broke down crying. He really laid it on thick, obviously!! Oh, and Mayor Hayes was there. Anyway, I have now $500 worth of savings bonds. I feel good. This is the first time my writing has ever amounted to anything. And maybe the last. Ha ha.”
June 5, 1978 [age 22]:
“My first day at work [at NASA, for the summer] started out a nightmare, as I wasn’t allowed to enter the premises (why they just waved me through last Friday for orientation I’ll never know) and I had to park outside and walk in; then I had to get a pass and show it to the sentries when I left the building at the main gate, but I forgot, and I didn’t look back when I heard their shouts of restraint. Luckily they didn’t run after me with guns and arrest me!”
June 15, 1978 [age 22]:
“My grades came yesterday and I got all A’s except for one ‘B’ – in Human Sexuality. Everyone in the dorms is teasing me about that. Guess I’m not too skilled in that area.”
