I know what you’re thinking.
You’re stunned.
It’s a whole entire Hubris cartoon without any dialogue at all.
None!
It’s weird. I know. There might be some dialogue in Monday’s cartoon.
Y’know, there’s not even a sound effect in this one. Double weird.
You know when someone is playing up how hard they had it, they’re not really complaining.
They’re waiting for you to tell them what a stone cold trooper they are.
And if you TELL them what a stone cold trooper they are and they want more, well… what does THAT tell ya?
What’s the phrase? “Too many cooks spoil the pot?” or is it “broth”? I dunno. This crowd looks like they’ll do fine, though.
They’ve just got to all start having the same conversation.
Nah, not really.
You work with the tools you have.
If you got mad duct tape skillz, you can’t go sweating what skills you lack! Use what you got.
I know a guy who can spot four-leaf clovers while just walking along. I have trouble seeing them if you put then in my hand next to two three leaf clovers. But my buddy- if he needs luck? Boom. Skillz.
There’s usually at least one in every crowd, right? The person who worries that everyone is where they should be, doing what they should be, and thinking what they should be.
Donny is that person for this crowd. Everyone else has proven themselves to be pretty dang reckless, so they should count themselves lucky he’s there.
It’s the terrible conundrum of Humanity… we don’t know what we don’t know. It leads people to start businesses that falter, enter into relationships that are remarkably like previous failed relationships, and volunteer for things that can get our heads broke.
I knew, briefly, a firefighter who was all the usual things that firefighters are- tall, brave, well-trained, confident, and fit… whatever. And he kayaked with us. We took him to some smaller rivers to help him train up, but the old crowd of us went to a class 4 river later that Summer. We told him to hang out, watch from the bank, meet us at the halfway point… all the usual stuff that newbies do until they’re ready for big water. We couldn’t make him see that the little river we’d been training him on was, at absolute best, a class 2. We tried to explain ‘pushy’ water, and how he hadn’t experienced it yet.
He didn’t know that he hadn’t experienced pushy water, and insisted that he’d paddle the Ocoee with us. Well, he’s a grown person, and we’d tried to get him to understand that he didn’t know what he didn’t know, but he’s got the right to say what he’s gonna do. …But there was also a highway alongside the entire river run, too. Makes it easier for him to quit. Or to have the body removed.
Which was good. After the first 100 yards of run, he knew a lot about what he didn’t know. He wiped the blood off his face and got out. Good man.
Which is all to say- Mrs. Nutley’s brood just learned a little about what they don’t know.
We, as communicators, must consider our audience. That’s what they tell you.
They also tell you not to write to suit someone else, but write what you believe.
They also say, “If mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”
All this is the long way ’round to say, “Tell people what they wanna hear.”
So. Did any of you guys wanna hear all this?
I used to be able to talk about very minute details of whitewater kayaks.
Now, I don’t even know which manufacturers have the hot boats, or which have shut down without letting me know.
But I bet I could talk up a fine, fine cardboard kayak.
You may have heard the old saying “The cobblers children run barefoot” or “The tinker’s family eats from wooden bowls” or any of a half-dozen versions thereof.
It means that if it’s YOUR thing, your clients get better treatment than your family, mostly ’cause you can do family stuff “any ol’ time”, but it’s not that important.
But when it comes to doing something you’d LOVE to trade your career for? Your beloved Hobby? You put so much time into it that it becomes self-defeating anyhow.
And so- Kara and Steven are working hard at pleasing their need to make a fantastic boat, and their need to show how much they know about kayaks and physics around one another. Those two things, added together, means that nobody’s paying attention to the clock.
To be honest, the only cardboard kayak events I know about were staged in swimming pools.
That’s probably a very good, safe, normal, fun idea.
Maybe I should have written a pool into the Hubris storyline at some point in the last nine years.
…
But I didn’t.
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