The Napkin Dispenser Fallacy

It's happened to you, too - I know it has.  You're dining in your favorite lunch spot or snagging a donut on the fly in a coffee shop.  You go to grab a napkin or two, only to discover that some enterprising soul has stuffed the dispenser so full of napkins that it is impossible to pull one out.  So you pick up the dispenser, shove a finger or two in the edge, and pull out upwards of a dozen napkins.  What you do with the extras once you've pulled them out is another blog altogether (use each of them, throw them out, leave them for the next poor bastard, etc.).  But for now I'm interested in the thought process of the minimum wage worker who stuffed the dispenser in the first place.  You can almost hear the dialogue and ensuing thought process:

"Larry, dammit, the napkin dispensers are empty again!  I thought I told you to fill them up!"

(Whining.) "I did!  I swear.  I did it like two minutes ago."

"Well, do it again."

"All right, all right, Josh.  Give me a break, Dude."  (Thinking.)  "Man I wish I was high.  Who needs this s**t?  Where are the stupid napkins?  Oh, here they are.  Now I'll just stuff some in.  Hey, wait a minute.  If I push this spring thing back a little more I can fit another wad in.  Yeah, that's what I'll do.  Then I won't have to fill this frigging thing up so soon and Josh, the big butt-wipe, will stop hollering at me."

Ah, poor Larry.  The fallacy in his thinking is that he will achieve a better result by cramming the dispenser with napkins beyond its functional capacity.  No sooner has this hapless stoner made his feeble attempt to improve his lot in life than you or I come in, dig into the dispenser in frustration, and unwittingly pee all over his perfect universe.

I've been thinking about this for years but only decided to blog about it a couple of days ago in connection with Thanksgiving (which is now merely a speed-bump on the superhighway between Halloween and Christmas, as evidenced by the paltry Thanksgiving display in the superstore - a few cans of pumpkin, sweet potatoes, green beans, mushroom soup, and onion rings).  Perfect: "stuffing" ourselves with food, and football, and shopping lends itself so well to the "napkin dispenser fallacy" analogy.

And then the world spins just a little further out of control as "Black Friday" shoppers crush a temporary Wal-Mart employee after pushing the door off its hinges and surging through the frame in the wee hours of Friday morning.  Even Dante would have trouble figuring out the right ring of hell for the members of this herd.  My sadness and disgust at this story tell me that analogy is a woefully inadequate response - so I will let it go.  (Feel free to noodle it over yourself if you are so inclined.)  I will, however, spend a little more time contemplating my own relationship with greed, gluttony, fear of scarcity in a life of plenty, and the thought that "more" is always better than "less."  What else can I do (except maybe go shopping to forget)?

Round and Round With the Bard

Basking in the afterglow of Obama's victory and a stunning performance by Christopher Plummer in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra the night before, my daughter Taylor and I found ourselves in Statford, Ontario on November 5 heading to the Festival Theater to catch a matinee of Romeo and Juliet. Knocking around town earlier that day we kept bumping into middle school and high school students buying souvenirs and bad food. So we weren't surprised when we got to theater and discovered that school groups comprised the lion's share of the audience. Past experience had taught me that the behavior of a school audience depends entirely on the play being performed - the kids are mesmerized by funny, plot-driven plays and are bored to tears with heavy, poetic dramas. We had nothing to worry about that day. Despite a few snickers when one of the actors dropped his trousers to change on stage and later when Romeo was all dopey over Juliet, the audience was, for the most part, rapt and well behaved.

The whole experience took me back 40 years. It was, if I'm remembering right, the fall of 1968 when my freshman English teacher took a group of us to the Stratford Festival to see Measure for Measure. I went on the trip, despite the prospect of yawning through a stuffy play, because, well, what high school kid wouldn't rather spend a day on the bus flirting with girls instead of sitting through classes? But when the fanfare played and the lights went down and the play began, I was totally sucked into a world of passion, intrigue, and language I never imagined when I was plodding though the lengthy speeches in Julius Caesar as my first exposure to Shakespeare. The play was bawdy, funny, and thought provoking. As always the acting and the staging were superb. So thanks to Ruth Friedman, my teacher, this small town, white-bread, skinny kid was ushered into a life-long love affair with theater, literature, and the Bard. I'm not sure I ever thanked her, or thanked her enough.

Over the years I've supported the Festival financially, but more importantly I've shared this experience with my first wife, my friends, my sister, my daughters, my current wife, Cary, and, in the late 1980's, with a group of kids from Highland Park Schools. After this year's experience I've decided it's time to "pay it forward" a little more and pass the experience along to another generation of school kids (if I can arrange financing with some of my business cronies and work out border issues). Maybe that, more than anything else, is a way I can finally give Mrs. Friedman the thanks she deserves.

Still basking in the the afterglow of Obama's victory and waiting anxiously for his term to begin, I find myself believing, once again, in the power of one caring person (not just the POTUS, but a teacher or a lawyer) to make a difference.