My brother sent me this text recently: “Please call ASAP.” This is the kind of message you only send someone when you have urgent, and probably bad, news. It is not the kind of message you send someone when you need the name of the place we went to that one time that had those extra dark and salty pretzels.
On the call, I pointed out, in what I promise was a helpful and restrained tone of voice, that when you send someone a terse, urgent text like that, his or her mind instantly reels with disaster scenarios and prepares for the worst. The next time you have a question about pretzels, I told him, maybe lead with that instead of implying that something terrible has happened to one of the loved ones we have in common.
“God,” he huffed. “You’re so dramatic.”
How am I the one being dramatic? I asked. You’re the one who sent the cryptic text. I defy anyone to read your message and expect it to be about snacks, I said.
In my mind, I mean. I said that in my mind. Out loud, I think I mumbled something bitter and then hung up. I know from decades of experience that when your debating position is, basically, Hey, that’s not me, that’s you, you’re the one doing the thing you’re saying that I’m doing! you’ve lost. In the first place, there are too many words in there to be snappy and convincing. And in the second place, it’s more or less what I’ve been whining to him since 1974. No point in giving it another round.
There are people in our lives who simply cannot resist turning every exchange into the most dramatic kind of announcement. I have a friend who has a habit of leaning in during a conversation, lowering his voice as if he’s about to say something deeply insightful, and then it’ll be something like, “You know, I’m beginning to think that Donald Trump is …” and here, he tilts his head in your direction and says in a slow, low-register whisper, “… deeply erratic.”
Really? We needed a lean-in, drop-voice maneuver for that? And yet, when he did this recently at a party, we all nodded gravely as if he had just said something terribly weighty. It wasn’t until a few moments later that I looked up from my drink and realized we had all been sucked into his little moment of drama. He had delivered an utterly unoriginal thought with exactly the right kind of razzle-dazzle drumroll. He had played us like a professional.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, it is said, would glide through social occasions, speaking in a breathy, barely audible whisper. Everyone else was obliged to lean in to hear her. The result was that every exchange felt like a private, juicy confessional. She had solved the timeless social problem of being an interesting conversationalist by surrounding boring words with enough manipulative technique that it didn’t matter what inane or pointless thing she was whispering — thoughts about the weather, meditations on what kind of hat to wear — because when the most glamorous woman in the world pulls you in with a whisper, you feel privileged and special. “That’s called charm,” a friend explained to me. “It sounds more like psychological warfare,” I said. She shrugged. “What’s the difference?”
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My brother, it goes without saying, is not the most glamorous woman in the world. Getting a text from him isn’t something on my bucket list. He just knew deep down that if he had asked me directly about the pretzels, I would have ignored his text for weeks. Or worse, I might have texted back, “Busy, no idea,” and left it at that. But by creating the illusion of a crisis, he got me to drop everything and call him back. It’s a trick he’s been playing on me for years.
On the other hand, I am currently sitting at my desk with a couple of deliciously dark and salty pretzels to my left, pretzels which I promised my brother I had no memory of and no way of obtaining. “Don’t remember those, but if I come across them again, I’ll let you know,” I told him. Now, crunching my way through a couple of them feels like sweet revenge. So, I guess we both have a flair for the dramatic.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and he is the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
