Areas of Unrest

3 August 1999 - What Would Miriam Do?

I was going to write about the dim sum luncheon I got taken to today - a gesture from a company vice president to our group for our general brilliance (technically, it was a group award for a planning task that everybody but me worked on because Milo thought I was doing useful things for software test, but I got included anyway). But I realized that other than the chicken feet (which I balked at), the Chinese broccoli, and the turnip cakes (which I like and nobody else does), I have no idea what most of the stuff we ate was. So, instead of food pornography, you get a philosophical entry today.

I am a complete sucker for those little books they stack near the checkout stands at bookstores. My favorites are things like photos of Barbie fashions and books of allegedly meaningful questions to discuss with your friends. Which is how I ended up with this little volume by Debra Raisner, Glenn Klausner and David Raisner titled What Would You Do?

Now, you'd think with a title like that, the book would be full of interesting moral dilemmas. Instead, I found that most of these had pretty obvious "no big deal" responses. For example, "You notice a coworker's zipper is down." Is there really anybody who would consider this such a major problem that they wouldn't just point it out to the person involved? "The waiter announces the house specials, without the price." Why exactly is this a problem? If you're on a tight budget and it might make a difference, you just ask the waiter.

Then there are a lot of situations that amount to you did a bad thing but nobody knows. Whether you broke a valuable item in a friend's house or clogged up the toilet, is there any adult who wouldn't just confess and apologize and (if appropriate) offer to pay for repair or replacement?

Here's one I like - "you see an ant on your windowsill." There are some actual options to this one. You can just squish it, you can conduct chemical warfare (personally, I recommend a brand of ant stakes called "Grant's Kills Ants" which I bought on the grounds that it contains arsenic, which is an ingredient I actually recognized, unlike the chemicals in most brands), you can lift the ant up on a piece of paper and take it outside where it will likely die in the ant stakes in your neighbor's garden, or you can leave it be. If it's one ant, I'd probably ignore it or take it outside. But, in my experience, ants don't come in the singular. I lived in an apartment several years ago that got sporadic ant infestations, lines and lines of them entering through the window and making their way across the dining room wall to the kitchen. The seal to the freezer was in poor repair and they got in the freezer. I opened the freezer to get some frozen veggies out and thousands of antsicles poured out. This is not an experience I recommend, though it makes an amusing story ten years down the road. I set out just two ant stakes and in half an hour the problem was solved.

There are a few of the situations that just bring out my worst smartass tendencies. "From out of your window you can see your neighbors having sex." I'm inclined to ask which neighbors and how attractive they are. Actually, I never much saw the point of those "look but don't touch" experiences and if I ran into the neighbors in question I'd probably just make an oblique remark to the effect of my needing to keep my curtains closed because I know they could see into my bedroom.

And then there is the one where so much depends on geography. "As you approach a stop light, it turns yellow. You have time to stop." In Colorado, the answer would be to stop. In Boston, however, the only possible response would be to accelerate!

So the next time you are faced with any life dilemma, you can now ask yourself "what would Miriam do?" and be sure that the single universal answer is "tell them, apologize, put out stakes and get the hell out."