Nutgraf

Spouse and I have been planning to buy a new (to us) car for the last few months. Phase 1 has been recently completed – namely, selling our lesser car. Spouse met with success via eBay, where a lovely young man from Pennsylvania found himself the proud new owner of an 18-year-old convertible that has served us well and provided Spouse with countless hours of entertainment lying on his back in the driveway beneath it.

So we’ve been discussing our qualifications for the prospective new car, including an elaborate comparative feature hierarchy, and realized today – during an otherwise pleasant walk through the neighborhood – that I no longer knew precisely what models we’re looking at, or how we’d arrived there.

It turned out that he’d been having a series of conversations with me that were only hampered by the fact that I wasn’t actually there at the time. See, as he considered options, he also considered my possible responses to them and drew several conclusions, some of which were accurate, but none of which I knew about.

Warning: Do not try this at home. This is advanced projection and a great way to start a fight with your significant other. We are professionals.

As we are wont to do, Spouse and I broke it down way too far and got deeply involved in both of our product comparison mental mapping techniques.

Spouse: The Punch Card Model

Pretend you have a series of trays each marked into a grid. Each tray has holes in various positions on the grid. When you stack the trays, there will be just a few spots through which you can see daylight. In Spouse’s mind these are the “finalists,” or models that possess all of the attributes we’re seeking.

Me: The Calder Model

Alexander Calder was an accomplished sculptor known – at least in part – for his incredible mobiles. I see our decision-making process as an elaborate system of weights and counterweights. Each feature has a value relative to the others – and is weighted. For example, my price spectrum is directly correlated to the feature set, and within that feature set, items may have different values. All-wheel-drive may take my “acceptable mileage” range up 5k, but only if the model year is X.

To summarize, Spouse is a physics nerd and I’m all Liberal Arts. And no, we still don’t know precisely what car we’re zeroing in on. But it got me thinking about how weird it is when people understand one another at all. You never know what’s going on in someone else’s head. Which is why have to give one another the benefit of the doubt and not take mental shortcuts.

Though it’s way more fun to jump to conclusions.

Spouse started today with another winner.

“I had one of those moments when I was thinking: ‘If I were preserved in amber right now, I would be gravely misunderstood by scientists in a million years.’”

We all have moments when we really hope the spy cameras are looking elsewhere. If you’re a parent or host to animals in your home (though we all know that if you have cats you are merely a tenant in their home), you have these often due to the fact that you are intimately, unavoidably and frequently involved with their bodily functions.

But it made me think (and I do hate to think) about how that is totally right. Context is king. And the concept of cultural relativism – which we studied in anthropology 101 – is applicable all over our daily life.

• When someone overhears only part of your conversation.
• When you tell a story without enough background.
• When you assume someone else is starting from the same experience as yourself.
• When you write an e-mail that’s just a little bit too glib.

Would someone from Mars understand what’s going on from a snapshot of this scene? I’m going to start calling it The Amber Standard.

And then I had a long talk with a dear friend over the Intertubes using Skype. And she is kind of a High Profile Authority on Social Media in a lot of ways and we got to talking about how frustrating it would be if you had something big (and perhaps unpleasant) going on in your life and you just can’t tweet about it because then you’ll have all of your followers all up in your business trying to be helpful, or now knowing too much about you and feeling very free to comment on it.

And when did we have to tweet about things to validate our lives, anyway? What is up with that?

Some people, though, chose to let it all hang out – scars, scabs, snot and all. I’m not going to get into whether that’s brave, bold or needy (me? I think it’s a combo). But they also get some great encouragement from their audience, who get to watch, criticize and goad from the security of the other side of the screen.

But this was supposed to be a funny light post about cleaning poo and hoping that the aliens don’t come for me when I’ve got a pissed off cat under my arm and am holding her ass under the tap in the bathtub. Poor thing – she just never learns that spiders don’t agree with her.

Another random workday e-mail from Spouse:

“I came to the realization that an idiot is a very complex mechanism. That is why it is practically unpredictable and so difficult to interface with. You also cannot bargain with or threaten it. ”

Honestly, these make my day.

• Advice Project: Do you have a keen workplace observation, or advice for how to succeed?

Once in a while, Spouse will send me an e-mail during the workday outlining a new theory about the nuances or workplace or interpersonal behavior. They are usually pretty incredible because he is in many ways a smart, smart man. He has consented to let me share this theory, which I think is just delightful and gave me a lot to think about.

Spouse says:

I think that people’s overall “well-meaning” towards someone, their benign disposition towards them and willingness to do favors (or even move a muscle) in order to make that person’s life easier, rest at a set of predetermined “ceilings,” much like the energy levels of the orbits of electrons, and not along a continuous range.

Okay class, are we with him so far?

Therefore, if they are on a “benign quantum level” of 1 towards you (bystander), and it takes, say, 7 abstract arbitrary “favor units” (funits) to move them to level 2 (ally), and you’ve been nice to them on 6 different occasions, but in increments of only 5 “funits” each, they are still BQL 1 relative to you, and still won’t move too many muscles when you need help, but you’re 30 funits out-of-pocket, which just were wasted into the “office space” around you…

So, if you’d done one pretty nice thing – valued at 7 or more funits – while having been neutral or a mild jerk on 5 other occasions, you’d be ahead of the person who was consistently nice.

Of course, perhaps after releasing 30 funits into the surrounding environment one has decreased the overall “bitching entropy gradient” of the surrounding office space, and as a result now reduced the BQL-jump ceiling from 7 funits to, say, 4.37, and then somebody just comes along and with a simple expenditure of very few funits gets someone who is still BQL 1 toward you to become their best BQL 3 buddy. Now you’re still out 30 funits, and have not benefited at all, but others have, and at much lesser funit expense.

And now you’ve gone and improved the overall environment, reducing the alliance barrier for others, but still not generating any direct allies for yourself. Boo. Spouse closes by positing that we should use this theory to build a working model to maximize our ROI for funit expenditure.

Hands off ladies, he’s mine.