Slate’s “Explainer” - Our Favorite!
Celebratin’ Slate.com’s 10th anniversary, our staff decided to contribute to our favorite Slate column, “Explainer”:
As you wonder why, your egotistical knee-jerk reaction of course is to assume that they didn’t “get it,” or that you were probably sabotaged, if even passive aggressively.
“It’s easy, maybe even in your genetic makeup to assume that you were conspired against or even figuratively screwed. For example, you may automatically find yourself wondering if Mark told Kristen what you’d said,” Brenda Reginald, lead researcher at the Hughes Initiative Institute (HII), observes. “But it’s simply not true. We’ve found through various controlled double-blind experiments that Mark kept to his promise. He didn’t even see Kristen this last week; he was at the Franklin Day Planner seminar.”
Well, then, it must be that you’re surrounded by incompetence or indifference that dragged you down in a way not comparable to the proverbial Dutch boy with his finger plugging the dyke, right?
“Well, even if there were a competency issue at your work, this particular instance was mostly yours to control.” This according to none other than, yes, Kolia VanBragen author of the watershed Okay, So I Was Wrong, It Wasn’t Wednesday, It Was Tuesday. But My Point’s Still the Same, Which Is...
And, finally, our HII guru Reginald debunks another common old wives’ tale – the ubiquitous “I bet the colors of what I sent them didn’t come across on their screen and, because of that, the little logo thing wound up looking like a vagina, which they won’t just dislike but may even find intentionally offensive.”
“No. They have great monitors,” Reginald insists. “Nothing looked more than even 38% vagina to them.”
So, then, why? “What happened was that your e-mail simply was lost in transit. This happens literally only once in every 240 million occurrences. But you’ll never know this or even suspect it because it’s so incredibly rare. You are just left to agonize endlessly about what happened and how it destroyed your career. You’ll lose all confidence, and your life will shatter.”
“But,” she continues, adding a dash of hope, “at least I’m adding a dash of hope.”
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