Competitors

‘Share and share alike’ was one of the things taught to us when we were young. I found it difficult at times but in the presence of older people it was best to comply. There were a few times when uncensored, I’d surprise myself by sharing something, prompted by a spontaneous surge of generosity from within. I’d feel quite saintly for a while and believe I should have been treated more kindly by folk, had they but known.

I can’t remember when it started but it probably began with a simply unhygienic sharing at school. My mate had an apple. I did not. So placing my arm around his shoulder as I’d seen other boys do, I said to him, “Give us a bite then, Jim?” And without any further persuasion, I enjoyed my first bite. Later, on observing other boys, I added, “Save us t’core too, will ya?” Over a period of time, the bite or the offer of the core would be shared as naturally as others had shared theirs. (I never extended my request to share oranges though. It was far too cold where I lived to be eating those anywhere but in the warmth of home. I also confess to an inbuilt aversion to tasting the juices of an orange watered down with the dribblings of a runny nose.)

Time and experience have brough competition to bear. There were other mates without an apple, so I set about acquiring skills to cope with the situation. It wasn’t long before I would hone in on an apple breathed on and being polished by a schoolmate as naturally as a female Codling moth’s antenna could pin point the male she sought. My oral seductions for a bite and the core had to be pruned and tamed; and they were.

After a bout of measles I was forced to wear spectacles, and the bottom dropped out of my persuasive approach, finely honed. Overnight I became a has-been mate, with four eyes. Then the school bully took to calling me ‘Skenner’, everyone laughed and I was relegated to a small group of forlorn no-hopers. My self-esteem plummeted. I was the last to be picked for soccer played with an empty tin – exciting within the four walls of the school yard where it was banned. I stood on the furthest boundary for cricket (played with a ball made from rags), if I was picked at all. No wonder I lost something of the bubbling infectious enjoyment of just being with my mates, especially when I we tried to see who could pee the highest up the wall in the boys’ loo (I could only reach the half-way mark). As a competitor I’d become a non-entity. A dreadful label for anyone.

I decided I’d become a monk. I’d be safe behind the cloistered walls of a monastery. I could have, if I’d lived in the Middle Ages… Many of my ideas and inspirations sprang from, “I could have, if…..” The monk idea didn’t last. I looked up the word in an encyclopaedia and pictures of them put me right off. They all looked so woe-begone, and it was obvious they could only reach the half-way mark too.

Anyway, it didn’t take me too long to accept being called four eyes, or Skenner. There seemed to be nothing I could do about it, so I’d grin and make some humorous comment…and in the process I gained a couple of great new mates. No point being woe-begone if I wasn’t even a monk, I thought.

Dennis Crompton © 1997

Getting it right

Most of us know someone who lacks the ability to get things done. The world is full of them. Others, the suggester-ers, may resort to name-calling, tears, comparisons with so-and-so (usually a relative on their side of the family), even mild hysterics. All to no avail when it comes to the likes of the person I know...

This person is splendidly unique in the way he remains completely unflappable, no matter what. He's been around a bit you see. Knows the score. That one thing can lead to another, and usually does. His mind is stocked with flaws within any suggestion regarding work made to him. The very first time he heard Howe's Law, that says:

Every man has a scheme that will not work,

he adopted it as his own but changed 'man' to 'person' of course, to conform with the politically correct way of thinking these days.

To forestall any possibility of him accepting a hint, challenge, threat, etc, to do something a suggester-er believes he should do, he uses a particular phrase. As if in thought, he allows his forehead to crease, he nods his head, looks the suggester-er in the eye and murmurs, "Yes I can do that. Later. I'll do it later." He calls it Joe's Law, and found that 'later' seldom arrived.

Now he knows through many encounters with his domestic suggester-er, that she will fume for a while, which is the subconscious recording of her mother reminding her:

You'll get little help from your Joe around the house. He's as thick as two planks, like the rest of his family...

Of course Joe up and leaves the scene. Well, he's knows it's better not to hang about when the record of her mother is playing, subconsciously, obnoxiously or otherwise.

I'm grateful too that Joe passed on other Laws he'd learned. They fit a surprising number of awkward situations: domestic, political or rural, very well. Like this one that James Payne wrote in 1884:

I had never had a piece of toast,
Particularly long and wide,
But fell upon the sanded floor,
And always on the buttered side.

Mr James Payne doesn't tell us how he reacted to this. I know it never bothered our Joe. I've seen him pick up toast or other food he'd dropped, laugh and murmur, "Well, bugger me," give it a quick wipe across his trouser leg and consume it without another thought of bacteria or bacterium. He never came to any serious harm that I'm aware of.

I did disagree with Joe, however, about Maier's Law, which says:

If the facts do not conform to the theory, they must be disposed of.

Now while that's quite humous and as good an explanation of how some certain folk deal with problems, in the field of aeronautics, for example, it would be dangerous to give it serious head room. Some research brough to light a certain George Nichols, project manager for Northrop Aviation in California, USA. He developed an idea from a remark he overheard from Captain E Murphy of the Wright Field Aircraft Research Laboratory. It was to do with the valve in an aircraft's hydraulic system. As they discussed the pros and cons of this particular valve, apparatently Captain E Murphy said, "Oh, anything can go wrong when it comes to designing things," or words to that effect.

(And that reminds me of this quote of Alan Shepard's that Joe told me recently:

It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract.)

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of proverbs suggests that George Nichols changed what he heard in the 1940s to:

If anything can go wrong it will go wrong.

Since I felt George thought the same way I do, I changed it to:

If anything can go wrong it sodding-well will go wrong,

for colour and effect, and I'm sure George would approve.

In the case of Joe, it's probably the reason why he always said he'd "do it later." He'd learned that by deferring doing anything because of the possibility of things going wrong, the need for it had either already passed or it had been completed by someone else.

By the way, I've just learned a new law which I must pass on to Joe. It's called Zymurgy's First Law of Evolving Systems Dynamics:

Once you open a can of worms, the only way you can re-can them is to use a larger can."

Dennis Crompton © 2001