Telling Stories

The challenge one faces when appearing on Jeopardy is that in the course of our lives we accumulate so many facts and associations, but our brain is only able to recover certain memories at certain times, while at other critical moments, we draw a complete blank.

The ability of humans to represent thoughts, objects, and actions with various symbols has, from our earliest beginnings, separated our species from others. Our ability to improve and cultivate these representations provides a key to the evolution of our cultures.

The urge to communicate with consistency over time and space must be as old as the urge to speak, to pronounce words. We all want others to know what we know, to see what we see, to experience what we have experienced. We want to influence people, to bend them to our way of thinking. We want to do this quickly , and we want to do it widely, to as many people as possible, and we want our messages to last.

The development of language itself was the first major step, a leap of consciousness that allowed a person to step out of the ever present now, and refer to an object with a sound. “Naming” has magical powers which still reverberate through our society. When the Gospel of John is read each Christmas, we continue to marvel at the music of “the Word”.

Out of the development of language, we have History, the ability to reconstruct the past, as well as the ability to make predictions about the future, and Literature, the imaginative ability to associate and compare and record. We have standardization. By naming objects, we begin to quantify them. Commerce flows from the ability to compare and trade disparate objects.

When that early man made the first crude drawings in the dirt, he took an incredible leap into the world of representation and symbols. Scratches on a shell or a slab of clay mysteriously resemble an experience or an object and somehow have the power to convey that experience or object to another person.

Since then, our advances in communicating have been refinements of these leaps from experience to consciousness to symbolic representation, as we have learned to refine and standardize and mange and store and transport and distribute these symbols, When we have mastered one set of symbols, we have developed secondary and tertiary layers of symbols (shorthand) to speed our interactions, and we have refined the vehicles that we use to transmit these symbols.

The constraints have been labor and materials, time, portability, bulk, cost, permanence, accessibility, control, accuracy, authority, standardization, reproduction.

Going on Jeopardy

Going on Jeopardy is not that easy. If you happen to live near LA, testing takes place in Culver City throughout the year. There are online tests which are open periodically, and the “Brain Bus” travels to various cities. Basically you have to pass the on-line test or the Brain Bus pre-test in order to be invited for an in-person audition. At the in-person audition, you have to take a fifty question written test, then play a brief game of Jeopardy, complete with buzzers, and then participate in a personality interview. If you make it through all that, you’ll be put into an “active pool” of potential contestants for 18 months. If you ever do get onto the show after all that, you have to hope that the category gods favor your knowledge set, and you don’t freeze on the buzzers. On the whole, seeing as how we live in Bennington Vermont, writing a book might be an easier task.

Writing and publishing a book today in many ways is much easier that it has ever been, although the publishing and printing businesses are both in complete shambles.

You could go on Jeopardy!

A little before lunch on Tuesday May 11, 2010, I was working in my office at Excelsior Printing Company trying to plan a small job for place-cards for the president of Williams College, for which I needed to order some paper, when David Crane stepped in and asked if I had a moment to meet with Sheila, the company controller. As David owned the company, I made time for him, and followed him down the hall. Entering Sheila’s office, it quickly became apparent that the reason I was there was to have my employment terminated.

I had worked at Excelsior for over 24 years, and I had observed the company struggle to be profitable in a difficult economic environment and an environment where the printing industry in particular was challenged by change, and I knew the ropes, so I really wasn’t surprised when David told me that he had some bad news, my position was being eliminated. There was a severance package of course, dependent on various concessions on my part. Some decisions I would have to make. The main decision had been made for me. I called Cathy my wife on her cell phone. It was lunchtime so she was outside on the playground at Bennington Elementary School where she works; she couldn’t believe it. I could believe it, because I had been living it, but she was astounded.

I packed up a few things, gave Sheila a hug, and headed home. Life had suddenly changed. At least it was spring with plenty of things to do. I came home, ate some lunch, waited around for a while.

About three, Matthew, my fifteen year old, came in from the bus. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

I was direct- “My job has been eliminated.”

“You’re kidding! You can’t be serious!”

“I am very serious”.

“I can’t believe it! – What are you going to do?”

“Don’t worry, we’ll be alright- we have plenty of money saved up”

“But aren’t you going to work?”

“There aren’t a lot of jobs out there right now; we’ll just have to see what happens.”

“You know what you should do? You should write a book, or go on Jeopardy!”