Man oh man, it got hot here fast. I took the dogs out at dawn and could have worn shorts. Mid-summer fry an egg on a sidewalk hot now. And here I am with a pile of leftover notes from the weekend’s posts, including Wittgenstein. But I ought to have my wits about me for that, and it’s too hot. Even in shirtsleeves during my walk down Market street just before 8 AM this morning, it was sticky.
Besides, I have a story to tell — a story involving deception and skullduggery and secrets and male pranks.
Guys may leave the lockerroom, but it’s an open question how much the lockerroom ever leaves them. I know some guys who play in various baseball fantasy leagues, and one of them, whom I’ll call Mike, was razzing “Roger” pretty hard about his perceived mistakes in drafts and trades, to my and “Bill’s” amusement.
They can ride each other pretty hard as they boast of their strategies. There’s a certain hardball jocularity, a verbal thumb wrestling or tongue wrestling for who has bragging rights and whose insights into the game are best, where it’s “nothing personal.”
Except it recently was carried to a new level.
As they bantered, Mike had shown Roger his team, and how he was in second place out of eight teams. Only he left his log-in and password behind on Roger’s screen. Which was when Roger saw his chance.
He logged in to Mike’s fantasy league and posted a message on the forum: Who has the best team? With two options: 1) Mike’s Beantown Bombers, or 2) I know they’re the best, but I won’t give the Bean-Blasters credit.
A couple people wrote in to say they didn’t care for the options. Roger felt he hadn’t goosed things quite enough, so next he sent an email message to all eight teams, from Mike’s account, saying his team was the best and he’d soon be in first place.
This time several guys, whose teams were third through sixth, wrote back to say they might have something to say about this.
And then Mike logged in to his league and found the messages.
It bears mentioning at this point that every league can have its own chemistry. I don’t play myself, but I know of a few guys whose leagues would accept this kind of mischief as typical boys will be boys.
Mike’s league, however, has some executives who take themselves pretty seriously, and Mike got the notion that the commissioner himself had posted the question to take him down a peg, so he called and asked what was going on.
“You tell me, why are you sending these messages?” the commish asked.
“I didn’t!”
“All of this stuff is coming from your account, take a look!”
Which was when Mike looked and found out it had.
All that day Mike checked his system and called the other guys in his league proclaiming his innocence. One of them said, you know, with all the hacking going on, you better check your computer’s security. Someone might be hacking your system and doing this as a joke, toying with you.
So Mike checked his accounts, including all his online banking. The paranoia kicked in and he began suspecting the worst, changing passwords and running antivirus programs. He didn’t get to bed until well after midnight, and lie there, wondering what was happening.
When he woke up the next morning an element of cool reasoning returned. No one was raiding his bank accounts. He’d seen no evidence of hacking skullduggery. When he ran the antivirus program, there was no sign of intrusion.
Who did he know who would do this?
He had a cousin he talked baseball with, and there was a chance that the cousin might have gotten in. Mike wanted to call his cousin, but there was a problem. His cousin’s wife just loved the telephone and for her long distance was even more valuable, especially on someone else’s nickel. It meant she could reach out and touch someone, in at least two different ways.
Which deterred him. But he wondered. And he had to know.
Finally, he picked up the phone and dialed — and she answered.
Twenty minutes of chewing his ear off later (problems in the schools, administrators and substitute teachers and frustration piled upon exasperation) he finally got to his man. Who had no idea what he was talking about, of course.
“Now, how would I do that from here? How would I know?”
Flummoxed now, he turned back to the baseball fans he knew outside the league. It seemed a long shot, as he assumed he’d closed out the program every time he had shown anyone his team, without realizing he had still been logged in. He called Bill first. Who knew, of course, but ratted no one out.
Then he called Roger. “How ya doin’?”
Roger played it cool, and Mike asked, “you weren’t bothered at all, by our kidding around that morning, were you?”
“Well, actually, I kind of was.”
“Oh, you can’t take that personally! I mean, I wouldn’t have made those trades, but I was just razzing you! That was just joking around! It’s nothing personal!”
They ironed it out together and finally Mike told Roger about the odd thing that had happened with all these messages in his fantasy league, and asked the question, “do you know anything about this?”
“What are you talking about?”
So Roger listened to the whole story about the phone calls to the league, the denials, the late-night paranoia, the long-distance family call and harangue and finally, finally — after all that — Roger confessed to the subterfuge, the prank. He was indeed the culprit.
“Guys don’t do that in this league!” Mike said. “These guys are all freaking out now that security has been compromised! Do you have any idea what you put me through?”
“Well, it was just a couple joke emails. I didn’t mean to cause all of that.”
“But you did! It happened!”
“Hey,” Roger replied, “don’t take it personally.”
* * * * * * * * * *
Charles W. Eliot, the President of Harvard University around the turn of the last century, spoke out against baseball because it employed deception. “This year I’m told the team did well because one pitcher had a fine curve ball,” he declared. “I understand that a curve ball is thrown with a deliberate attempt to deceive. Surely that is not an ability we should want to foster at Harvard.”
The curveball itself might not be so bad. But you need to make sure the catcher’s mitt is there to end it, before it gets away from you.
OmbudsBen 
Humor is based on harmless deception, too.
Of course. There’s lots of light-hearted humor.
I grew up with Scandinavian jokes, which are mostly based on misunderstandings. Something can be interpreted two ways, and the set-up takes one of those ways for the pay-off in the other. Such as the two girls talking, and one says, “I caught my boyfriend flirting.” To which the other replies, “Ya, I caught mine dat vay, too.”
Silly, often corny stuff. It morphs lots of ways, but basic misunderstandings are the essence.
Most American humor is based more in English, Germanic, and Celtic traditions, where pain is more likely to be part of the punchline.
In prior generations, slapstick, Laurel & Hardy, etc. More recently “Something About Mary” or whatever it was called, seemed to be derived at least in part from painful situations.
To paraphrase Twain: something is funny if it would make you mad if it happened to you.
And I think the best comedians capitalize on that. After Richard Pryor’s free-basing burn injuries, he ended his movie “Live at the Sunset Strip” by telling a joke on himself. He lit a match and waved it in a slow, jumpy line for the crowd and asked, “what’s this?” then gave the punchline: “Richard Pryor running down the street.”
Not taking oneself too seriously is often endearing to others.
You can hardly say some things without humor, because they are too painful to express in any other way. Jon Stewart is the reigning comic genius in my opinion. Do you ever watch the Daily Show?
Well I’m not sure it was funny. It seems a kind of nasty thing to do to a friend. But I guess boys will be boys.
WC
Whig: I’ve heard of the Daily Show, but the wife doesn’t like it, and we watch little “network” programming, anyway. Mostly PBS and I sneak off to watch some ESPN; beyond that, mostly movies.
Some day I’m going to have to check it out.
WC: That’s a lot of why I wrote it up. It took a direction the original prankster hadn’t intended. The thing is, I know him, and he’s a good guy, at heart. I think in retrospect he’d probably like to have been able to step in a bit quicker before it took a life of its own.
But that was much of the point. Sometimes a stunt is pulled thinking everything will continue on a certain course, and it doesn’t.
There’s a play on words with fooling around and feeling foolish I might have worked into the title, had I thought of it at the time.