Tearing Down the Walls Between Generations

In my office, we have an Administrative Assistant who likes to write cheerful little aphorisms on the whiteboard in front of her desk. Happy little quips and comments on life's trials and tribulations that are intended to make you smile as you tear through her desk with a chainsaw. OK, I made up that last part.

Today's witticism is

"It is a statistical certainty that 100% of the shots you don't take won't go in."

The first thing this made me think was that my boss's boss has been playing too much golf. The second thing this made me consider was that the author of this glop obviously is not up on their quantum mechanics, or even Zen koans. Hmmm. Well, that leaves us with philosophical inconsistancies that start with Plato and one-hand-clapping and end with Planck's Constant and me chasing people around the office while wearing a gorilla suit, a pink tutu, and a strap-on marital aid again, screaming

"How do you know how many shots you haven't taken?"

People should think about the consequences before writing junk philosophy like that on whiteboards. Dangerous mutterings ahoy. It's just a good thing that the AA didn't dot her "i's" with little smiley faces, or it would have been on, baby.

Well, that's not what this was about. It's about the young man who cut Mrs. Wiggy off in traffic this morning.

I saw it happen, since I was in the car behind Mrs. Wiggy. That is, we drive two cars to work, because we go to different places. We start out in the same place though, so for awhile, we follow each other to work. Well, one of us follows the other, we're not that metaphysically hip. That's illegal in Wilson, North Carolina. We have baseball, though, so that kind of makes up for it.

So we came to a traffic light, and I found myself alongside the callow youth who had cut Mrs. Wiggy off mere moments before. I began to speak to him through our open car windows - he had to turn his radio down to hear me, which he did. Obliging lad.

I informed him that he had, in fact, driven around my wife at a high rate of speed and then cut her off, which act I disapproved of. I said this while making direct eye contact and kept a friendly expression on my mug, which does not look at all like Charles Manson on a crack binge, having lost his contact lenses in a sand storm.

The youth replied to my comments:

"You don't know me like that."
"Excuse me?"
"You don't know me like that."
"Know you like what?"
"Like that. I ain't tryin' to be hearing that."
"Hearing what?"

I eventually parsed that the young man was informing me that since I was not known to him and a member of his circle of friends, I was not allowed to make criticism of his driving skills. Either that or he was informing me that he had hearing problems. I'm not sure.

I persisted in informing him that his manner of driving, while perhaps impressive on a race track in the presence of giggling high school girls and his besotted peer group, left something to be desired on the city streets alongside people who just wanted to get to work. He replied,

"I'm just gettin' my speed on."

Having tumbled to the scheme, I recognized that he was telling me that this was the speed he normally drove, and he intended to continue doing so in the future. Or he was having intimate relations with the "C" from E=MC2, you decide. Either interpretation was a bit of a mind-boggler for me.

Since I realized that communiction was going to be somewhat of an issue, and we were stopped at a red light, I decided that pictographs, which have served our virtuous explorers and cocktail parties so well in the past, would be useful here. So I exited my vehicle and opened the trunk of my car and retrieved a wooden Louisville Slugger, which is amazingly adept at getting points of view across. It translates well into many patois and seems to say quite clearly:

"I believe I have the floor, Mister Chairman."

Or, in the words of his generation, I was just gettin' my bat on.
He seemed to have grasped my meaning, and although he left in great haste shortly thereafter, I trust that he'll be a bit more careful driving his car on city streets with his remaining fingers. I felt that my civic duty has been done for the day.

Communication, after all, is key. By recognizing the differences between our generations and reaching for symbols that we could both readily understand, I feel that I performed a valuable service, which I had quite hoped to be able to repeat in the future.

I must hasten to add that Mrs. Wiggy witnessed this incident and she was not as pleased as I might have otherwise hoped. Quite unlike those fine novels where the fair damsel faints into the arms of the brave knight who has rescued her from the dragon, apparently, brave knights are to be restricted to giving the dragon a stern look in the future. And doing the dishes.

Maybe I should have used a nine-iron.

Love,

Wiggy