Embarassing Moments: Financial Ruin

I continue to be on "Wall Street Crash" watch while reading the New Yorker. By late 1929 I've seen a ton of advertisements which ENCOURAGE people to invest heavily in the market, but this one from September 14, 1929 -- just a month before the crash happened -- is truly, truly ominous.


I wonder: were financial experts at the time warning of a crash, and was this advertisement a reflection of that? It seems like an awfully big coincidence.

Embarassing Moments: The Precocious Me

Having met all of my program requirements except for a single elective course, I returned to the University of Waterloo and took a bird course called "Philosophy of Women and Men." It was dull and pedestrian...exactly what I wanted for the final course of my school career.

We were assigned to read an article about "geek culture," and the following week we returned to discuss the article. I hadn't read it, but I thought myself sufficiently interesting and knowledgeable to raise my hand and say the following:

"Not that this has anything to do with the article, but it might be interesting to point out the original usage of the word 'geek.' A geek was a circus performer who bit the heads off of live chickens. It would be interesting to find out how the word's meaning changed over the years to represent the geeks we know today."

*I* thought it was a fascinating observation, but everybody in the class just STARED at me. Assuming they didn't believe me, I insisted that the whole thing was true but not common knowledge, and told them to do some research if they didn't believe me.

Total silence. "What a bunch of weirdos," I thought, and sat back down.

That night I decided to read the "geek culture" article that I was supposed to have read in order to prepare for the class. The first sentence of the article -- which everybody had read but me -- went something like this:

"The original 'geeks' were performers who bit the heads off chickens in circus sideshows. Here's the way the word 'geek' has changed over the years..."

Embarrassing Moments: The Precocious Teen

In the late '90s, the video store I worked at moved to a new location and the stock was distributed differently throughout the store.

One night a teenage boy came into the store and started looking around.

"This place has changed since I used to come here!" he said.

"Yes, everything's been moved."

The boy walked around a corner and came back. "The Russ Meyer section is with the other sexploitation films now."

"Well...it was always with those films, only now they're labeled."

"No, those sections were always apart! I know because I used to come here all the time!"

"I WORKED here, and I'm telling you that they were always together."

The boy huffed and walked to another section of the store, then came back to the counter again. "I notice you finally got the Nick Kern videos."

"We've had them for years."

"No you didn't! You didn't have them last year!"

"We DID have them last year."

"I've been coming here for YEARS and I've NEVER SEEN THEM."

This kid was obviously worked up about something so I stopped arguing and let him spout his incorrect factoids, which he continued to do for another half hour.

The next night I came to work and told my boss the story. "You should have seen this kid! He was such a freak! Kept on babbling about how he used to come to the store, as if anybody cared, and insisting on describing 'how the store used to be'...and getting it wrong every time! It was embarassing to listen to him, he was such a brat, you would have loved making fun of him."

Suddenly, out of a crowd of people who were standing near the counter, the boy pushed his way forward. "THAT WAS ME!" he yelled, then ran away.

We stood there, stunned. The boy's mother came to the counter and said "He's been in the hospital for a while, he's clinically depressed. He always loved this store because he said that people here respected him and took him seriously. This was the first place he wanted to visit when he came home."

I felt terrible. The boy came back and started crying, yelling at me while the mother stood in the background. I pulled a rationalization out of my butt.

"We make fun of EVERYBODY here," I said. "Are you telling me you've never heard us make fun of customers before? That's what we DO. If we didn't care about a person, we'd never talk about them. Seriously."

This was partially true -- we DID always make fun of customers -- but we genuinely disliked the people we mocked. Fortunately the kid was so desperate that he grasped my rationale. By the end of the night he was happy again. Whew.

I learned a crucial lesson that I try to apply every day (and should apply more often in this blog): don't mock people in public places, and try to remember that annoying people are sometimes covering up a deep fragility. You must not drive them to suicide in front of their mothers.