“The Wordy Government Memo”
Undue length of statement is always dangerous, especially where the person addressed is not compelled to read; and there is no law compelling judges to read the briefs that are filed….
Lincoln needed fewer than 300 words for his Gettysburg address; to compose the Ten Commandments required some 290 words; but it is said that a Federal agency found it necessary to employ 29,711 words to set forth the regulations governing the prices that may be charged for fresh fruits.
Just open Utne Reader to any page. Overturned truisms. Shattered shibboleths. Debunked bromides. Truth!…
UTNE READER saves you time and money. The New York Times notes that the Lord’s Prayer contains 56 words, the 23rd. Psalm 118 words, the Gettysburg Address 226 words, and the Ten Commandments 297 words, while the U. S. Department of Agriculture directive on pricing cabbage weighs in at 15,626 words.
First, from Frank E. Cooper’s 1953 textbook Writing in Law Practice, p. 60; second, a 1990 sales pitch from Utne Reader. This bogus criticism of supposed bureaucratic verbosity has been around for at least 50 years. Sometimes the directive is said to refer to the pricing of foghorns or of duck eggs. Two further legends about supposed government ineptness are included with “Bogus Warnings” in Chapter 20.
14
Baffled by Technology
Technology, as pundits like to say, is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing part is not very prominent in urban legends; the curse part is definitely where the action is. Take computers, for example. For all the wondrous tasks that computers perform nowadays, there are no interesting folk stories about their successes. But since computers are only as reliable as their operators, there are lots of legends about computers disabling the inept. Most often the stories hinge on a telephone call for technical support made to a manufacturer of hardware or software.
According to one story, a caller to tech support was unable to print a document, and the telephone consultant at the software manufacturer spent 20 minutes suggesting solutions to the problem. Nothing worked. Finally the frustrated operator asked the caller whether the printer was turned on. The caller exclaimed, “That couldn’t be the problem, because that was it the last time I called [pause]…Uh oh…. I’m soooooo embarrassed.”
Another classic: An office worker called for a repair person because his computer’s display failed to light up when he turned the unit on. The technician walked in, turned up the brightness knob, and departed. Lesson: the simplest solution is often the right one. But people expect their computers to have complex problems, so they overlook simple and easily solvable ones.
Yet another classic: A user called tech support about an accounting program that contained the instruction “Press any key to continue.” The caller complained that his program always crashed at that point:
“What were you doing right then, when it failed?” the operator asked.
The caller replied, “I pressed the ANY key, just like the manual said, but then the screen went blank.”
“The ANY key? What’s that?”
“Well, I couldn’t find it on the keyboard,” said the user, “so I figured it must be the one on the back that’s not marked.”
The programmer explained the obvious fact that “any key” in the instructions meant literally any key on the keyboard, and that the unmarked button he had pressed was the restart button. Pressing it would wipe out all previous work not saved to a disk.
The computer story I’ve heard most often lately is about the guy who called the manufacturer of his machine to see if they could replace or repair a broken cup holder:
“Cup holder?” asks the operator.
“Yes,” said the caller. “I accidentally pushed it too hard, and I bent it so that it won’t retract any more the way it used to.”
“Where is this cup holder?” asks the operator.
“Right on the front of the computer—left side—you know, that handy little shelf that is supposed to slide out to hold a coffee cup while I’m working.”
“You’re resting your coffee cup on the CD-ROM drive??”
Maybe someday there will be an urban legend about every gadget in the Sharper Image catalog, but for now most of the doubtful stories about technology seem to be about computers, ATMs, a few household appliances, and—of course—cars. Where are the stories about, say, talking bathroom scales, nail-polish driers, exercise machines, answering machines, VCRs, satellite dishes, shredders, crepe cookers, pasta makers, food processors, and deep fryers? Oops, I just heard one about a deep fryer:
There was this guy who did a lot of drugs, and one night he came home from work, got stoned, and then decided to fix some dinner. He turned on his deep fryer to make some French fries (no health-food nut this!). And when he thought the oil was hot enough for cooking, he checked it out by sticking his hand in the fryer, which immediately deep-fried his hand.
A legend focusing on the other end of the social scale is the one about the nice middle-class woman who found someone’s bank card lying in the street one night, and thought of the easiest way to turn it in via an ATM:
She inserted the card into the slot of the next ATM she saw and punched in some numbers at random. She knew that without the proper Personal Identification Number [PIN] the machine would keep the card and a bank official would find it in the morning. But, against all odds, she hit the right PIN number, and the screen obligingly flashed the message, “How much do you wish to withdraw?”
The story does not explain what the woman did next, but it does sometimes mention that her image was caught by the bank’s surveillance camera.
Often a new technological gadget will spawn a new legend. The stories in this chapter about microwave ovens, tanning beds, and cruise control illustrate the process. Another example concerns those little microchip music boxes used to make musical greeting cards. When you open the card, an appropriate tune plays; when you close the card, it stops. Shortly after the musical cards came on the market, a story about them followed:
Someone got a musical birthday card, and family members fooled around opening and closing the card until they all got tired of hearing “Happy Birthday.” Unfortunately, at that point the card—stuck in the open position—somehow got lost under the flooring, behind a wall panel, or in some other hard-to-reach place and “Happy Birthday” kept on playing and playing and playing. Supposedly, the family called the manufacturer (there’s that theme again!) and learned that the card should only play for X number of hours. But evidently the device was over-engineered; according to the story, “It’s still going strong, and they can’t stop it without ripping out the floor.”
Could such things happen? Of course they could, and probably they have happened. I assume that the next report is genuine, because I’ve heard many first-person accounts of roughly the same occurrence. The following is from Ask Anne and Nan, a 1989 book of reprinted columns of household hints:
Q: We have lived in our house for many years and have never had this problem. We are bothered by a loud chirping, and although we can’t see them, we suspect that they are crickets. They have chirped night and day for two months. Our house is insulated. Have you any solution? Would sonar waves help?
Annoyed, Springfield
A: It sounds like crickets to us. They come into the house when it begins to turn cold outside; they could have gained access through the cellar, on wood you brought in, or just through the door. We suggest you follow the chirping to its source. Crickets like dark, warm places: around hearths, under cabinets in the bathroom or clothes closets are good places to start.
Reader Feedback: Ferris Harris, of Proctorsville, wrote: “The question of chirping noises brought to mind the experience of a family member. She also heard chirping and found the source was a smoke detector in a drawer. It had been there some time, and when the battery got weak, it chirped, as described in Annoyed’s letter.”
Annoyed Replied: “Thank you so much for your help in solving our cricket problem.
We put a new battery in our smoke detector and it did the job! No more chirping!”
Way to go, Ferris Harris! In variations on this story—or is it variations on the actual problem?—the chirping sound comes from the basement, which the family seals off with duct tape around the access door until the exterminator arrives. The conclusion is much like the others about mechanical problems, in that the workman shows up, applies the simple obvious solution, and departs, while red-faced techno-innocents remain.
* * *
“Unlocking the Modern Car”
A woman came out of a department store at a large shopping mall to the parking lot carrying a big stack of packages. As she approached her car, she fumbled with her battery-powered remote door-opener, but the car doors did not click open. She rested the packages on the hood of the car and tried again and again, no luck.
“Oh, darn,” she said aloud to herself. “The batteries in this opener are dead, and now I’ll have to schlepp these packages all the way back into the mall when I go in to buy new ones.”
A man who had just parked in the space next to hers heard her and asked if he could try the opener; perhaps he could get it to work. “It’s no use,” the woman said, “I should have changed the batteries long ago.” But she handed over the opener.
The man took a look at the device, then selected a key from the attached key-chain and opened the car with its own key.
* * *
“The Microwaved Pet”
Windhoek, South Africa—A distraught elderly woman here is cursing modern technology because her beloved cat died in a microwave oven.
Auctioneer Mr. Gerry Heij related the story of a call from the shocked woman, who said she wanted to sell the oven.
She explained that her cat got soaking wet in the rain and she thought the quickest way to dry him out would be to put him in the microwave oven.
She put the cat in, set the timer to “defrost” and switched on.
The cat’s hair immediately stood on end and 10 seconds later it exploded, the woman told Mr. Heij.
The auctioneer cleaned up the hairs and sold the oven for 150 rands.
From the Argus of Cape Town, South Africa, May 6, 1988. Although I have collected several published accounts of actual microwaved pets, with names, dates, and sometimes photographs, snippets like this one in the media are clearly just reports of legends. The auctioneer in this instance retells a well-known story as part of his sales pitch, and a local paper reports it as news. When microwave ovens first became available for home use, the story was told that a woman had always used her conventional oven to dry her pet after washing it, and then her son gave her a microwave oven for Christmas. Sometimes it is a child who has zapped the pet. A cooked-poodle version of the story was illustrated beautifully on the cover of Whole Earth Review (fall 1985) in an issue featuring my article on urban legends. Entertainer Arsenio Hall, in the persona of his character Chunky A, alludes to “The Microwaved Pet” in his rap song “Sorry,” included on his CD Large and In Charge. For a horrendous variation on this theme, see “The Hippie Baby Sitter” legend in Chapter 10.
“The Technology Contest”
Waterbury [Connecticut] used to be called the Brass City. It was the Silicon Valley of its day, when clocks and locks and metal instruments carried the day. A friend of mine, Al Bell, owned a factory here. He told me a story that might help you understand what’s going on: Once upon a time, early in World War Two, engineers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute sent their latest engineering breakthrough to a Waterbury wire factory. It was a length of wire so thin they delivered it with a microscope. Top that! The Waterbury boys drilled a hole through it.
I first heard this story about 15 years ago, only then it was set in a Texas trade show. It was related as from a friend of a friend who was an engineer in the firm. They had produced an exceedingly thin glass rod which they were displaying on a specially built stand. A day or two into the show, a group of Japanese engineers from one of the adjoining booths stopped by and asked to borrow the rod for two hours so they could examine it more carefully. The engineers, flattered by the attention from the Japanese and unduly proud of their accomplishment, agreed. Two hours later the rod was returned with bows of thanks. Some days later, when the Texas engineers were back in their labs, there was reason to examine their prized rod. They were startled to find that a hole had been drilled through it lengthwise.
The first is from Justin Scott’s 1995 novel StoneDust; in 1996, Daniel Cruson, town historian of Newtown, Connecticut, sent me the relevant pages as well as the second example in his accompanying letter. There are several variations of this story involving different rival nations and other products. Prototypes for “The Technology Contest,” in which artists compete to produce realistic paintings, exist from the ancient world through the Renaissance. Bowls of fruit, insects, curtains, and the like were painted with such exquisite realism and detail that they were mistaken for the real thing. A modern counterpart describes an art student who, on the envelope containing his application for a scholarship, draws a postage stamp that fools the post office. A 1994 printed advertisement for Lexus automobiles showed a photograph of fingers stretching out a “wispy wire” with the caption, “We told our engineers to make tolerances thinner than the human hair. They replied, ‘Blonde or brunette?’” Now all we need is for the Infiniti car company to produce an ad in which the Lexus hair is drilled lengthwise by Infiniti engineers.
“Curses! Broiled Again!”
Recently my secretary told me this story. It was told to her by a girlfriend who heard it from a coworker who said she heard it from a friend who was in the same wedding party as the victim.
A young woman was going to be in a wedding party, but she was unhappy at her pale un-tanned body. Since there are 30-minute-per-day limits set at tanning salons, she visited several salons each day, thus increasing the speed of tanning in the shortest time possible.
After several weeks of this regime, she noticed that she was not feeling at all well, and she had a foul odor about her body, even after bathing.
So she made an appointment with her doctor, and after examining her he pronounced that she had managed to cook her internal organs by over-exposure to the tanning rays. The odor was actually the rotting of these organs, and further, this foolish girl had just two weeks to live.
Sent to me in January 1988 by Bill Kestell of New Holstein, Wisconsin. This story mistakenly assumes that microwaves are generated by tanning lamps; it was told nationwide in the summer of 1987 and got massive media publicity in “Dear Abby” columns of September 22 and November 6, both of which firmly debunked the tale. Sometimes the victim is a cheerleader preparing herself for a training camp, or a bride-to-be anticipating her honeymoon in Hawaii. The legend continued to annoy tanning-salon owners to such a degree that the June/July 1989 issue of the industry magazine Tanning Trends had to debunk it once again. But telling continued. In October 1994, a student at West Liberty (West Virginia) State College reported to me that her instructor in a health class included the story as an example of everyday causes of skin cancer; this victim was getting tanned so she would look nice at her homecoming dance. There are, of course, real dangers inherent in overexposing oneself to ultraviolet rays, whether from the sun or from tanning lamps, but the “broiled again!” legend derives from fantasy, not science.
“Push-Starting the Car”
A motorist from Cranston, Rhode Island, sheepishly swears this story is true—but even if it isn’t true it has to be told. He was driving on the Merritt Parkway when his battery died. He flagged down a woman driver, and she agreed to give him a push to start his car. Because his car had an automatic transmission, he explained to her, “You’ll have to get up to 30 or 35 miles an hour to get me started.”
The lady nodded wisely. The stalled driver climbed into his car and waited for her to line up behind him. He waited and waited. Then he turned around to see where the woman was. She was there all right—coming at him at 35 mil
es an hour.
Damage to his car: $300.
Later the [Providence] Bulletin checked with state police, and had to announce that the story was not true. It appeared as a joke in a Boston paper, and was phoned into the Providence paper as straight news by a prankster.
From what the [Reader’s] Digest editors have been able to discover, this is another of those “true” stories that sweep the country. Before the AP item appeared we had already received more than 100 accounts of the incident. The earliest came from California, but it was followed in a few days by a version from Massachusetts. The story also came from Texas, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Connecticut—even from the Canal Zone, where the car was on the Trans-Isthmian Highway. In each case the writer insisted that the driver was his mother, a neighbor, a close friend or a coworker. One writer was the mechanic who repaired the cars, another was the insurance adjuster. One version had a wife pushing her husband—and she landed in the hospital with a fractured skull.
After the AP carried the story, hundreds of clippings poured into the Digest—and they’re still coming—including one from a woman in Tennessee who vowed that the Cranston motorist was her brother.
Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends Page 29