Time heals all 'Oops!'
Everyone has “Oops!” stories. Tales that make you blush or wince, depending on how much of a fool you think you made of yourself. Words and acts that you wish you could take back. The kind you would delete from your own memory bank if you could and from those who heard or saw you. That’s exactly what happened to a friend. After some 10 years, she bumped into a high school classmate who was much chubbier than before, so she effusively asked, “When is the baby due?” The response was a cold, icy stare, and an abrupt brush-off. She realized what a blunder she had made, but didn’t quite know how to repair the damage done. This is the dreaded Oops moment when we wish we had read a self-help book on how to get the shoe out of our mouth with grace!
But time heals all Oops. And when your cheeks are no longer blushing red, you’re on your way to recovery. But before the memory is fully expunged, rationalized, or denied that it happened at all — it’s a healthy, if not valiant, exercise to actually recall it, and resolve never to let it happen again. Instead of just burying and putting our private goofs and gaffes out of our mind, let us bravely dissect and observe the forensics of an Oops. Then we can arrest the culprit that sets us up for the commission of a faux pas. Better yet, write out and memorize a retrieval script, so we minimize adlib errors.
Speaking of scripts, isn’t it curious that the stickiest lines somehow revolve around the act of communicating? Think of all the famous and memorable lines that live on, often quoted from TV shows and movies again and again. In Cool Hand Luke, starring Paul Newman, the line “What we have here is a failure to communicate” was drawled by a sadistic prison guard played by Strother Martin. It became immortalized, taking its place with other famous classics such as Dirty Harry’s “Go ahead, make my day,” and Taxi Driver’s “You talkin’ to me?” And what about Jack Nicholson’s memorable line from A Few Good Men? “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!” Or the inimitable Oliver Hardy signature as he passes the blame to Stan Laurel, “A fine mess you got me into!” — from the slapstick movie duo, Laurel and Hardy.
At the core of any verbal slipup is the danger of failure to communicate. Miscommunication leads to misunderstanding. Most of the time, you just need a sense of humor to salvage the situation. But constant misunderstanding can be like water to a rock. Over time, it erodes even the most steadfast of affiliations. It can lead to divorce, loss of business, love and career, not to mention loss of trust and, of course, loss of face. In Asia, face defines the person. So that even in these modern times, extreme loss of face can even lead to loss of life, often by one’s own hand. harakiri or suicide is an honorable way out in Japan.
Normally, we shouldn’t have to disembowel ourselves when we bungle occasionally. The trick is to minimize the possibility with a little care and some sensitivity. Learn from mistakes and recover your composure if possible. For instance, when my friend realized that her classmate was just hefty, not pregnant, she might have countered, “I’m so sorry; you are absolutely glowing, so I thought it must be from motherhood!” Of course, you must sound sincere so it’s important to always have at least a kernel of truth in what you say. Besides, you are easier to forgive when you make an honest attempt to save face.
Most Oops anecdotes are benign. You live to see another day and possibly commit another howler. In a new business presentation we made many years ago, my colleague presented a storyboard that spoofed Zeus being angry at orange juice pretenders. She topped it off by using the idiomatic expression, “I swear on a stack of Bibles!” We realized we were in double jeopardy because we were insensitive to the clients who were Born Again Christians. We didn’t win the pitch for reasons other than our Oops. But we knew that it was a contributing factor and we learned our lesson. Today, we try to understand the corporate culture beforehand and factor it in the presentation.
My favorite joke illustrates how putting two and two together and coming up with five can be a big problem. Two zoology students were conducting an experiment with a hapless spider. They wanted to see what would happen if they cut off its eight legs, two at a time. So they did. They cut off the first two and said, “Walk!” and the spider did. They did the same until only two legs remained, each time ordering the spider to walk. And walk the spider did. When the last legs were removed, they asked it to walk and it didn’t. They shouted at the spider to walk, but it didn’t budge. So they concluded that when all the eight legs were cut off, the spider turned deaf! A lot of crossed signals happen when one party draws the wrong inference from a situation.
In a major drugstore chain, there’s an advocacy message that goes something like this: “We may not be able to protect our children from the world all the time. But we should limit their TV viewing and use of the Internet.” Great advice. Except that this was being played on their in-store TV monitor that loops all their ads and those of their suppliers. While waiting for your prescription to be filled you’re forced to watch the amateurish commercials. And so you wish that they would practice as they preach and start limiting television viewing by turning theirs off. It’s a well-intentioned message that becomes contradictory in the milieu!
Before cell phones, pagers were the prime tool for reaching people. This was fodder for a lot of miscom! Once, a harried wife kept trying to track down her husband who was an art director. The office didn’t know his whereabouts. So she paged him demanding his exact location. The husband’s reply made her ballistic. It read, “I’m in Tarlac with a client.” She replied via page, “Don’t bother to come home!” She packed all his clothes in a suitcase and threw them out in the street.
When she finally calmed down enough to talk to her husband, she found out to her embarrassment that her husband was at an Interlock for the TV ad he was working on. And their male client was there to approve it.
I’m sure you have more stories to tell. Oops moments humble us and make us more self-aware, a hallmark of emotional intelligence. So they’re not entirely useless. Besides, if the tales made you laugh, you’re also healthier for it.
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