According to the melancholy Spanish philosopher Georges Santayana (who is responsible for a variety of gloomy philosophical quotes that are often cited), history happens the first time as a tragedy, and the second time as farce. My day today resembles the opposite phenomenon, where the precise same problem occurs the first time as a farce, and the second time as a tragedy. I find it remarkable, and more than a little unpleasant, that precisely the same problem was the case in both situations, a problem caused by faulty communication, which appears to be one of the more consistently vexing problems of my life. I’m not sure exactly why I am called upon to reflect over and over again on this problem, or why my innate distaste and troubles with ambiguity should lead to consistently troublesome results, but I found it striking that the day has been bookended by two problems with the identical cause, one of them quite funny and the other quite serious and troubling.

On Monday, I received a communication of some interest to me personally, and there was some ambiguity in the message. Being a person with a keen eye for noticing ambiguity and wanting to resolve it (this may be my tragic flaw if I were the hero of a Greek play, now that I think about it), I asked the sender of the message to clarify it, and the person gave one answer and I acted upon that answer. As it happened, I ended up driving all the way to Hillsboro (a pretty long drive) to find out that the later answer was correct and that the earlier one was in error. So I turned in the paperwork I had about it, drove back to a quiet place where I could read a book for the Air & Space Power Journal (which I promptly did), and then picked up some groceries and returned home, thinking I would have the material for a lighthearted and casual post about ambiguity in messages and getting one’s wires crossed and all of that hilarity, showing that I had the spirits to sail through it as if it was nothing.

Then it happened again, in a way that was not nearly so amusing to me. In fact, it happened in a way that was almost predictable, where a friendly gesture (albeit a thoughtless one) led to a rather alarming and unpleasant response, where it was impossible to get the straight story because most of the people talking weren’t telling the truth and those who knew the truth weren’t able to talk about it. When words like sheriff’s car and other similar expressions got tossed around, the situation turned from a misunderstanding to a potentially vastly more serious affair. Suffice it to say that ambiguity and mixed messages and unclear boundaries are the bane of my existence, partly because I am a quietly stubborn person who is not deterred lightly, and partly because in the absence of clear instructions I tend to act on the best case scenario, only to find out that matters do not turn out necessarily very well in that light, not least when there is an absence of accurate.

What makes ambiguity such an enemy of effective communication is that it can be read a variety of different ways by different people, most of whom are well-meaning but also acting in self-interest (even if sometimes the way we act is not always very beneficial to our self-interest, were we more rational beings at least). One of the elements of Ulysses Grant’s genius in warfare was the way in which his communications to subordinates were clear and concise and lacking in ambiguity, something which he picked up from an earlier general (and president) Zachary Taylor. Since most people do not understand exactly how a message can go wrong, but some us are blessed with a lifetime of experience in seeing how wires can get crossed, how communication becomes difficult in the absence of honesty and openness, and how being a bit of an idiot can be really disastrous to one’s life. Experience is not a kind teacher, but some of us are slow learners.