Preying On The Gullible

If I have a weakness, it's that I will take any opportunity I can to prey on the gullible.

Now, keep in mind this is purely for entertainment purposes. I don't con people (occasional streeeeeetching of my resume earlier in my career aside).

But if I'm in just the wrong mood, and I sense just the right amount of credulity...well, I'm only human.

I got it from my dad.

Of course, it was usually an educational thing with Dad. I remember the best one of all; one day, we all filed into our American Lit class (one of the three classes where I had my dad as teacher). He had a stack of computer printouts. Back in 1979, computer printouts were both fairly rare, and usually implied some sort of official status to the information they were on.

He handed them out to us. Each had our name, and a number.

Dad explained, once we all got our sheets, that in the interest of more efficiently using scarce post-secondary education resources the government had been collating our test scores, grades, and other indicators for years. They were going to start channelling kids toward where they were best suited. Our class, '81, was going to be the pilot program.

If students had a 90 or better, they'd be channelled toward the colleges and universities. They were headed toward the elite; government, medical or law schools, the officer corps in the military, upper management, whatever.

Scores from 70 to 89 were slated for tech school or junior college. They were going to go on the be the bureaucrats, the foremen and middle managers, the non-commissioned officers and so on.

Anyone from 69 on down was headed for a life in the fields, running equipment, digging ditches, the enlisted ranks.

Naturally, almost everyone in the class was in the mid sixties.

Some kids, thinking they were on their way toward medical school, broke down in tears. Others got angry.

Naturally, it was a hoax, intended to teach the kids something about discrimination. It may have been the best lesson I've seen on the subject.

Me? I do it just for fun.

My favorites so far? Hard to choose:

1. Bored sick of hearing drunk tell their hunting stories back when I was a club disc jockey, I started talking about the ultimate hunting season; North Dakota's Hand to Hand Moose season. An annual lottery, I told them, chose five hunters who'd be allowed to go into the Turtle Mountains to hunt deer with a knife. Blades had to be under five inches. Several of the hunters solemnly nodded their heads and said they'd heard of the season, and one came back a few weeks later and said he'd written North Dakota Fish and Game to get into the lottery.
2. Bored with talk about other nation's revolutionary traditions, I spun a long yarn to a college crowd about my great grandparents and their families' roles in the Norwegian revolution. Great Grampa Jarl liberated the Swedish concentration camp at Sjonafjonet, doncha know, while his brother led the assault on the swedish city of Goteborg in one of the world's first Armored Cars, in 1905, at which point Swedish king Bjorn capitulated, giving Norway its independence.
3. At a party shortly after I graduated from college, I told my sister's roommate that during World War II the US was so short of metal, they made nickles out of compressed ham. She nodded her head - and the following semester, while talking about WWII, she said as much to the professor. The professor stopped, jaw agape, and asked where in the world she'd heard that. "Mitch Berg" she said. The professor apparently nodded, groaned, muttered "figures", (he'd been my minor advisor), and after holding his head wearily in his hands for a few minutes, set her straight.

So just watch it.

Posted by Mitch at March 21, 2005 08:05 AM | TrackBack