My2ROOTS

Whatever is standard

I wasn’t very well versed in Civil Engineering when I took my first job as a lowly paid intern. But I had an idea of how to make it work. TKL had told me that when you don’t know what you are talking about just ask for “the standard” whatever you thought that meant in any realm.

Throughout the years I’ve tried to apply this, not all situations worked out 100% of the time.

For instance the first time a General Contractor called me up and asked if I knew why the decking was all ½” short. Not knowing I said “well that was the standard size” of course that was the wrong answer and for the next 30 minutes I heard about how that decking and my bowels would soon become one unified pair.

There was a wrong number that called me and started talking like we knew each other and he was explaining to me that the delivery was going to be delayed for something that we were going to be doing on a bridge. To which I laid out my well versed and now twice applied “well does that meet the standard” to which he paused and then replied, well we’ve never had a standard for when a driver is killed in a construction accident where we have to get the delivery to you. Oooh…sorry, maybe I should have listened closer.

When recently talking to a police officer about the break-in at my garage. He asked me what was missing and I was rattling off a list of items. Then I came to a startling discovery, my mannequin was missing. So I told him that and he says to me “is it standard for you to keep a mannequin in your garage?” he must have gone to the TKL school of how to react when you just don’t know.

I get into these situations where someone will ask me a question and I’ll either catch only part of the question or I won’t understand the question either due to a foreign language or a speech impediment. But do I ask for clarification? NO, that would be way to easy. I instead try to piece together the 3 words I do understand. My vet asked me if I knew something to which I didn’t understand the question, based on the answer I would never have gotten in correct, but I said “well its sort of the standard around my house” apparently the question was “is there often blood in the pee?” so you can see how my answer may have been startling.

Lastly was the time I was talking with an engineer who worked for Ford and he was going on about some FMVSS (Federal Motor Vehicles Safety Standard) that I didn’t know about but probably should have. He’s asking me about the test procedure and how we’ll run it. I said “we’ll apply the standard battery of tests” but I didn’t stop there then I added “and we’ll do some voice of customer evaluations to confirm the results” apparently he had been asking me about a test that involved firing a human head shape at the interior of the car. This of course met with a long pause followed by “do you know what your talking about?” and my answer to this “of course it’s the…standard”