Confidence Man

Really.

It was my fault. If I didn’t want to answer highly technical questions from random strangers, I shouldn’t have worn my red fleece vest to the home improvement center. The disaster that happened the day I wore a white shirt and black tie to the Buy More electronics emporium should have been a clue, but maybe I’m a slow learner.

In my defense, it was cold on the morning I went to the home improvement center and my vest is warm and comfortable. It’s also — and I don’t want to underestimate the role this played in the deception that followed — red.

“I’m hanging a flat screen TV. Can you tell me what kind of hardware to use?”

Was he asking me? Was a total stranger really asking me a question about home improvement?

Well, to be fair, only a total stranger would ask me for home repair advice. Anyone who knows me would know that getting my opinion on hardware is about as useful as having a surgeon ask me, “What sort of clamp should I use to resect the posterior cerebral artery in a patient with a rapidly evolving aneurysm?”

“Ummm….a clean one?”

So, I’d gone to the home improvement center to find a new snow shovel and suddenly I was an expert because I happened to be wearing a red vest. I might as well have worn a tutu in the hopes I’d turn into a ballerina.

I started to tell the TV guy that I had no idea, but something about the look in his eye stopped me. He was looking up to me as the man with the answers. It’s hard to resist that kind of admirtion so I did what any self-respecting guy would do in that situation; I made up an answer.

“Is it bigger than thirty-two inches?” I asked.

He nodded proudly. “It’s forty-eight.”

“Ah…that’ll be a heavy one. You’re probably talking about TV that’s at least … let’s see … pi times the circumference of a rectangle multiplied by Planck’s constant … hoo-boy! That TV has got to mass in around three hundred eighteen foot pounds. That’s gonna take some serious mounting hardware. You do have a strong enough bracket, don’t you?”

“I think so. They sold it to me with the TV.”

“Yeah, it’ll probably do, but you’re right to get some new screws. In fact, I’d suggest you use nickel-molybdenum self-anchoring lag bolts, probably with eighteen gauge threads, a number six eye-ring, counter-rotating blades, and a liquid-cooled exhaust system.”

In the time-honored tradition of guys, I was hiding my bitter lack of actual knowledge under a thick, sweet coating of technical mumbo-jumbo. It worked. Stunned, the other guy blinked and asked, “How would I install those?”

“Oh easy.” I was on a roll now, I just needed another gee-whiz term to seal the deal. “Just buy yourself a a lag bolt install-ulator. You’ll find them in the tool aisle.”

As he wandered off, I felt a quiet pride mixed with the sincere hope that he’d get some advice from someone else before he actually tried to install his TV.

Don’t judge me too harshly. I’m not the first guy in history to make something up in answer to a question he knew nothing about. Stonehenge is just the end result of a guy who got overly enthusiastic when someone asked him if he knew how to make a calendar.

Come to think of it, if a brain surgeon actually did ask my opinion about an operation, I’d probably suggest a Kelly clamp because I vaguely recall hearing it on an old episode of M*A*S*H and it sounds very doctor-ish.

Guys want to appear smart the way dogs want to appear friendly. This explains the current international banking crisis. A bunch of guys in nice suits were asked if they knew of any innovative ways to make money. Instead of admitting the truth — pretty much all of really good ways of making money had already been invented — they came up with the idea of making risky loans. They tested the idea with home mortgages and the housing market folded like a lemonade stand in a hurricane. When someone asked why the first idea hadn’t worked, the suit guys came up with an even better idea and loaned billions of dollars to the city of Dubai for construction projects.

When the loans came due, Dubai asked for a little more time to pay up, but assured the suit guys that it “totally promises to pay the money back.”

Based on their track record, the suit guys are probably trying to figure out how to loan trillions of dollars to the planet Pluto. If they manage that, we can expect our first contact with extraterrestrials to be a message telling us they really are going to pay back the bazillions of dollars they owe if we’ll just give them a little more time.

You would think that guys would be smarter about this and stop believing each other. After all, we know that we make stuff up. Shouldn’t that make us suspicious of what other guys say?

You would think so, but you’d be wrong. Just like the politician in The Emperor’s New Clothes who bought an outfit made entirely of empty promises and flattery, we’re easily taken in by a guy who sounds sure of himself. We’ll believe any outrageous idea that’s delivered in a self-assured tone of voice by a guy with a firm handshake and good eye contact. In fact, the more outrageous the better.

If it comes down to choosing between the guy who says he can work out the nature of the universe through quiet contemplation and the guy who says he needs a multi-billion dollar research facility built underground near the Swiss border; we’ll build the Large Hadron Collider every time.