“Just because you are a character doesn’t mean that you have character.” – Pulp Fiction
When the bugman began to hate . . .
There was a time after She Who Will Not Be Named was forever banished from Stately Wilder Manor, but before I met The Mrs. Yes, your host, the John Wilder was single. Can you believe I didn’t beat the ladies off with a stick? I mean, the restraining order and all . . . well . . . the less said about that the better.
There was one particular woman who had caught my attention. One evening, I introduced her to my friend who I’ll call Jim, mainly because his name is Jim. Oops – I think I’ve said too much. Now everyone will know who he is. If only Jim weren’t such a rare name!
“What did you think?” I asked Jim.
Ever the good friend, Jim said, and this is an exact quote: “What do you two have in common besides your eyes and her butt?”
They say that for a statement to really hurt, it has to be true. Jim had delivered the Atomic Wedgie of Truth®. He was, of course, correct. And you should be so lucky to have friends that will tell you the truth as bluntly and completely as Jim. The relationship between the woman’s butt and my eyes ended soon thereafter.
A friend of mine went to the hospital because of a wedgie – sadly, he was diagnosed with Stage 4 dorkiness.
Not only is character important in dating, it was pretty important to a company I worked for once upon a time: I was one of the employees lucky enough to be trained in behavior-based interviewing. The basic idea of behavior-based interviewing is that people, like the official results of Jeffery Epstein’s autopsy, don’t change very much. Therefore, the best way to get an actual prediction of the candidate’s future behavior is to understand the candidate’s past behavior. Then we were taught how to interview so they would share relevant situations so we could understand the candidate really well.
If the interview technique is done right, it doesn’t feel like an interview, it feels like casual conversation.
I was horrible in my first few interviews, as in scaring the candidate because he thought the company hired robotic androids that only appeared to be human. Thankfully, there was a feedback system from the candidates, and my boss gave me some tips based on it. He told me that it was okay to blink and breathe while conducting an interview, and that wouldn’t be perceived by the candidate as weakness. I took a risk that he was right, and the candidates stopped shaking so much during the interviews. I guess staring unblinkingly directly into their eyes nonstop during the interview is a bit creepy, so I allowed myself no fewer than three blinks per minute.
I really messed up this interview. They asked me if I was a people person. I answered, “Yes! I am a people! Or is they go great with mustard a better answer?”
But if you do anything several hundred times, you can get pretty good at it unless you’re Nicholas Cage acting in a movie. It (really) did bug the candidates that I could take notes without looking down at my notepad. It’s not a great superpower, but I decided to keep that quirk going, since it was a sign of dominance that I could use to weed out the weak. And I eventually ended up interviewing hundreds of new graduate applicants – heck, I even used the behavior-based interviewing techniques on The Mrs. the night we met to see if she had any of the character, um, difficulties that led to the untimely departure of She Who Will Not Be Named.
The Mrs. didn’t have those flaws.
So, on one blind date the girl said she was a huge country fan. Me: “Well, I like Russia, too.”
The thing that surprised me the most was that interviewees would tell me the most incredible things – like how they’d lied to people. How they’d stolen from their employer. How much they felt the world was out to get them. By the way, if you lived in Fayetteville, Arkansas in 1998 and never figured out who shaved your pig, dyed it blue, and dressed it like Dolly Parton, I think I might know the guy that did it. Don’t worry – he told me it was mostly consensual. Except for the perfume.
The interviewing system was based almost entirely around character. The company I was working for considered good character the most important factor in what constituted a good employee. More than once I heard, “You can teach a good person to do their job, but you can’t teach a bad person to be good,” from my boss. Then he’d shake his head and look at me with a sad, defeated expression on his face. Of course I didn’t blink. I had to show him the respect due the alpha of the pack.
But there were employees who actually possessed good character there, too. As an example, one employee I know was attempting to find some financial information that was relevant to his job. Somehow in working through the company computer network he stumbled upon the check writing software.
Thankfully the money is headed her way from that Nigerian prince.
Yes. My friend found the software that would have allowed him to write himself a check for $50,000,000. No human would have seen the check – it would have been printed on company check stock, signed with a dot-matrix signature, popped in the mail, and delivered directly to my friend’s house. The company had billions (really) in the bank. It wouldn’t have been immediately caught.
My friend called me over and showed it to me. It was a moment I was in awe. This company had huge piles of money in various bank accounts. I realized that just a few keystrokes could end up making my friend an overnight millionaire, at least until the audit found a few missing millions. In a situation that would tempt some people, my friend calmly picked up the phone, called accounting, and let them know they had a really big problem. And he didn’t do it from a beach in Brazil while sipping some drink that comes with an umbrella. But not flaming. That’s for tourists.
That’s good character.
Climate science has taught us that science demands seriousness.
The company actually had a list of traits they were looking for. What did they consider good character? Humility was on the list, as was honesty and a few other things people generally think are representative of virtue, as I wrote about Kardashians, Hairy Bikinis, Elvis, Wealth, and Virtue. There are a lot of things that change about people, but absent a significant psychological event (and sometimes not even then), their character doesn’t change.
That brings me to this statement: the most important part of parenting is helping to build character. I think I’ve established that character is important, so when is it important?
I think that the primary focus of parenthood is guiding children through one critical age range: middle school, from the ages of around 11 to, say, 14. Did you go to grade school with someone who was pretty cool, only to watch them become a complete dirtbag in high school? I know I did, and the time that they went downhill was in middle school.
The ages of 11 to 14 are where kids are first practicing at being adults, and are in the process of crystallizing the character that will define them for the rest of their lives. They’re understanding being really hurt and rejected for the first time, how to deal with defeat. What love is. What their values are. How to deal with victory. They’re understanding what true friendship and loyalty really is. They’re finally (thankfully) understanding what deodorant is, though generally just a few weeks too late.
Knowing how to relate to Pugsley is everything.
And they’re deciding if they want to reject virtue and turn to the Dark Side© evil. Sorry, but Disney® has trademarked that phrase, along with all jokes related to mice, intellectual property abuse, and and ducks. And, yes, I understand that some percentage, say 70%, of character is flat-out genetic in nature. There are families of dirtbags that have been dirtbags for 100 years. If you think about it, you’ll know who I’m talking about.
As I mentioned before, I even used the techniques I learned from interviewing in the blind date that eventually netted The Mrs. When I finally took The Mrs. over to meet Jim and his family, Jim approved. “You guys seem great for each other.”
Perhaps Seneca, writing back in 60 AD or so (back when your Momma was just 50 years old), said it best:
Each person acquires their own character, but their official roles are designated by chance. You should invite some to your table because they are deserving, others because they may come to deserve it.”
When you are evaluating people to be your friend, your mate, or your employee, character is primary. Great butts are secondary, in the end.
Get it? Butts? In the end?
I kill me.
