Dear Internets. Hello from Wyndotte Street. The purpose of this post is to ask fellow readers, have you ever considered blaming yourself?*
Specifically, this is about the innate, natural tendency we all share to blame the idiots around us for, you know, whatever you got. The following is a story told by author Douglas Adams. He said it happened to him. Problem is, it’s also a story other people told long before that. Kind of a standing folk legend. So did it happen?
Yes. Without question. Because it happened To Arthur Dent in the fourth book of the Hitchhiker’s trilogy, and we’ve all been living in that universe since October, 1979.
Besides. A good allegory is a good allegory. And at some point, this is every single one of us:
‘Cookies’ by Douglas Adams
“This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person was me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I’d gotten the time of the train wrong. I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table.
I want you to picture the scene. It’s very important that you get this very clear in your mind. Here’s the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There’s a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase. It didn’t look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it.
Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There’s nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies.
You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know. . . But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in the newspaper, couldn’t do anything, and thought, what am I going to do?
In the end I thought, Nothing for it, I’ll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, That settled him. But it hadn’t because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie. Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. ‘Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice . . .’ I mean, it doesn’t really work.
We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away. Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and sat back.
A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies.
The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who’s had the same exact story, only he doesn’t have the punch line.”
-Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
“Cookies”
That’s an excerpt from this site (http://thejumbuckisalmostextinct.com/2009/12/cookies-by-douglas-adams/).
And this is how it is in the book. Remember Fenchurch? Yeah. You remember Fenchurch.
Meanwhile, on Wyndotte Street, Barnaby Gallagher, Christopher Gardner, Ashley Harris, Alessandro Mastrobuono, Christian Monzon, Brigett Fink and B. Owen Robinson helpfully illustrate how when the problem is you, the answer is closer than you think.
I’m@Work – Efficiency Expert
“Worth every penny.”
There’s more at www.yndotStreet.com.
– by Adam Fike
