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How You Say It Is More Important Than What You Say
And there is something even more important than that
“It might be a good idea to wash your hair.”
“What? Are you saying my hair is dirty?”
“No. I’m saying your hair is on fire!”
My wife drives too close to the car in front.
The most important lesson I learned from thirty years of attending road accidents — all those crumpled bumpers, smashed windscreens, broken bones, dead bodies — is that the biggest cause of accidents is driving too close to the car in front.
I have a mantra.
One thousand and one, one thousand and two.
When I taught my kids to drive, I got them to look at the telegraph pole or a marking on the road that the car in front just passed, then, out loud, they had to say, “One thousand and one, one thousand and two.”
If they passed the marker before they were finished saying it, they were driving too close. In the wet or the dark, this changed to, “One thousand and one, one thousand and two, one thousand and three.” If it was light snow or heavy rain, they had to finish on, “One thousand and four.” And if it was icy, they had to walk.
I do most of the driving, but my wife occasionally takes the wheel. When this happens, she often hears me mumbling, “One thousand and…” — she drives too close to the car in front, you see. That makes me nervous.
This one time I got scared.
“One thous… Whoa, you’re driving too close!”
Sometimes our communication calls for urgency. It’s much better to shout, “You’re hair is on fucking fire,” and risk upsetting someone than to politely offer advice that wouldn’t be amiss as a clue in a cryptic crossword.
My wife is amazing. She could put Hewlett Packard’s Frontier supercomputer to shame. Its 62.86 gigaflops processor performing precision operations is nothing compared to the supercharged synapses wired inside her head.
Her thought processes are bewilderingly quick.
I hadn’t finished the ‘a’ of ‘Whoa’ before her head spun around and her eyes bored into mine…
