Sans Fig Leaf
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"I don't think it means what you think it means"
15 January, 2004
One time I worked at this place that had an annual Halloween Costume Contest. Everyone was encouraged to dress up for Halloween. Late in the afternoon there was a little party with ice cream and such. Ballots were passed out and we were supposed to vote for categories like, "Best Traditional Costume," "Costome Most Like True Self," and such like that. There were small prizes handed out after the votes were cast (gift certificates at local restaraunts, I think).
It was all fun and silly while it lasted.
The final year seemed to go off as usual. There were lots of silly costumes and everyone had a good time. The winners were announced, prizes were handed out, and everyone went back to work. Then, the next month the Employee Newsletter came out. And under a picture of the person who had won in the category "Best Overall" it said, "The unanimous winner!" in enormous bold print.
Except it wasn't unanimous. I knew it wasn't because I had voted for a different costume. Not that I didn't think the winner's costume was good. I thought that there were three costumes that deserved the appellation "best overall" and his was one of them. I hadn't been upset that he won. But I had voted for someone else. That meant that it was not unanimous.
My first reaction was that it wasn't that important. Likely the person who wrote the newsletter didn't know what the word "unanimous" meant. If he'd won by an overwhelming majority, with only, let's imagine, my solitary vote against him, it was nearly unanimous. So I decided not to say anything. Until the next day, in the coffee room, one of my other co-workers asked me if I'd seen the newsletter. When I acknowledged that I had, she said she was trying to decide whether she should say something about an inaccuracy in the newsletter.
With just a slight sinking sensation, I asked what inaccuracy.
She, too, had voted for a different costume for Best Overall. And she knew that here ballot had gotten into the ballot box before the people who were supposed the count them went off to another room. So it wasn't unanimous, and she wondered if it was worth the trouble of explaining to the newsletter person that they had misused the word unanimous. I confessed that I'd had the same thought, because I had also voted for a different person.
We discussed it a bit, and were just reaching the conclusion I had the day before--that it wasn't important enough to worry about--when another co-worker joined us. She'd heard enough of our conversation to figure out what we were discussing, and she was in the same situation. She had voted for someone other than the winner, and was feeling slightly perturbed about the use of the word "unananimous" in the newsletter.
We each headed back to our offices. I had ambivalent feelings. I now knew that there had been more than just my vote cast for another person, which made the use of the word unanimous just a bit more annoying. After a couple days of this continuing to bug me at weird moments, I finally composed a polite note pointing out that unanimous wasn't correct, and that perhaps the people responsible for the newsletter had either misunderstood the meaning of unanimous, or had simply been misinformed by the people who counted the votes. I stuck the note in the suggestion box and didn't really think about it further.
Not quite eleven months later, the usual announcement went out that it was nearly time for Halloween, again, and that we would be having the usual ice cream social in the afternoon, but there would no longer be any voting on costumes, since "several people were upset at last year's results."
But I hadn't been upset at the results. And neither had anyone else I talked to. So I decided to drop in on the director of administration, because we had a friendly relationship; she was one of the people I had been responsible for training when she was first hired years before (when the company was much smaller). I knew I could have a heart-to-heart with her and not cause any waves. So I confessed that I was one of the people who had put a note in the suggestion box about the use of the word "unanimous" but it was only the word that I had been quibbling with. My concern was a simple word-maven reaction, really. It had nothing to do with the results or voting process of th costume contest.
Ten people had turned in notes like mine, each person pointing that they had voted for someone else, therefore it wasn't a unanimous decision. At the time, all the notes placed in the suggestion box were shared with the operations committee of the company's board of directors. One member of the committee, who was not an executive in the company, had told the others a story about a horrible lawsuit he had been involved with at a company he was vice president of, where a competition for a small prize among employees had turned ugly. This made the others on the committee decide that no prizes or awards other than tokens such as certificates, could be offered by the company without the full process being approved by the company's attorney.
One time that I told this story to an acquaintance, they told me the whole thing was my fault. "You knew it wasn't really important. Why did you have to make a big deal about it?"
First, just because something isn't earthshakingly important does not mean that it is completely meaningless. A lot of people want to divide issue and concerns that way. If it isn't dreadfully important they treat it as completely unimportant. Words matter. The old saw, "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" is simply untrue. Just as anyone who has every had an incorrect negative comment placed on their credit report. Or ask the guy who was arrested for asking the security people at an airport what they had done to make his wife cry.
Second, I didn't make a big deal out of it. All that I did was suggest that an official corporate publication ought to use language and grammar correctly. None of us had been told that the operations committee of the board of directors had started reading everything that was placed in the suggestion box. When the suggestion box was first instituted, we were told that the director of administration would read all items put in the suggestion box, make a report to the president, and pass along specific comments to the appropriate manager. Since she was the supervisor of the people who put together the newsletter, it shouldn't have needed to go beyond her.
In retrospect, I do agree that it probably would have been better to go have a private talk with the administration person. In live conversation, face-to-face, it is usually easier to make my meaning clear. But I disagree that I should have anticipated that a simple comment about the misuse of a word would be taken as a threat to sue over the silly Halloween costume contest. It all comes down to keeping things in perspective.
We shouldn't completely disregard all minor issues. We shouldn't spent a lot of time and effort considering the full implications of every minor issue, either. There is a middle ground. We can find it, if we're willing to think and communicate.