the telephone game

I remember playing the telephone game in elementary school.

You'd whisper something in your neighbor's ear--like "Bill's head is red." Your neighbor would do likewise in his neighbor's ear and so on down the chain of 30 kids.

At the end of the chain, the last kid would stand up and tell the class what he heard--"Jill's butt is bleeding"--and compare it to the original statment. The whole class would break out laughing at how ridiculous the end statement was and then wonder in amazement how "Bill's head is red" could change to something so random and different.

Believe it or not, this happens way more often than not in real life. Even with email, everything gets intrepreted out of context and people freak out.

At a place I had worked at in the past, a VP made an offhand comment about something, and a bunch of emails were sent around trying to figure out what the VP meant. No one bothered to ask the VP directly; people weren't comfortable doing so, and it was nearly impossible getting time on his schedule.

Suddenly a whole product group of 50 people dropped what they were doing and spent the next week coming up with a powerpoint presention that would show the VP the "value" of their project to the company. The comment turned out to be a joke he was telling someone else, and was in fact a compliment for the product.

Everyone laughed at the end--not at how funny the joke was--but at how ridiculous the situation was and how 50 people could waste a week on a frivolous presentation because they misunderstood a joke.

So lesson on the day: watch what you say and what you write in your emails. Someone's bound to whisper it to someone else or forward your emails on (and on), and it'll mutate into something totally unexpected.