Fatal silence

Occasionally I get stuck, with unfortunate results

On at least a couple of occasions, I have found myself lost for words in a situation where my silence was fatal to something that in retrospect I wanted to have. Even now, looking back, I’m not sure why my verbal facilities failed me.

The first example that I can remember happened when I was working at Digital Equipment Corporation, probably in early 1990. I was attending a symposium (organized by some of my colleagues) focusing on ideas relating to digital libraries. Vint Cerf was one of the guests, already famous among technical people, and my manager introduced me to him. I’m sure that for all the senior folks gathered there, I was a bright young thing – a promising graduate school dropout (at that point) who was doing interesting work. Accordingly, Vint asked me if I wanted to go with him to Skywalker Ranch, where he could introduce me to other interesting folks.

For reasons that I don’t understand, I froze. I think that I was overwhelmed by the sense that I needed to process this offer with my wife, and that I needed to have her support to deal with it. At least, that’s the way it seems to me now – but, at the time, all that I knew was that I was panicking. Everyone around me was, of course, uncomfortable with my silence; I remember my manager prompting me, “you can say ‘yes’.”

Alas, even with this helpful suggestion, I remained frozen. It would have been better for me if I had collapsed, but I wasn’t having a seizure and I wasn’t fainting. I was in excellent health and excellent shape, I just couldn’t get my brain to decide that it was OK to say “yes” and/or I couldn’t get my mouth to say anything.

I no longer remember exactly how the situation resolved itself, but I assume that everyone found some way of shifting the topic to be less embarrassing for all parties. Naturally, I didn’t go to Skywalker Ranch; and naturally, I never had any subsequent contact with Vint Cerf.

I’m not too heartbroken by the specific loss there, although I think it would have been good to make those connections. I don’t spend any energy envisioning some detailed alternative reality of what could have happened. For all I know, the Vint Cerf connection and the Skywalker Ranch expedition might have fallen apart for totally unrelated reasons. Regardless, for many years this incident bothered me. And obviously I can still recall it, even decades later.

Happily, it doesn’t bother me anymore, whereas it used to be a searing pain of humiliation to revisit it in my memory. That is not how it feels now, but the memory does prompt me to wonder: what was going on that I should have that kind of experience?

A second example comes from my early days at Riverbed, when I was out in the field in Singapore, probably in late 2004 or early 2005. At that point we were a tiny company. In organizational terms, I was part of the headquarters staff. I was in Singapore with our head of Asia Pacific sales. I was there to support him in his initial contacts with prospects, presenting the technical and business merits of our technology. Our meetings with prospects went well. I remember a moment in which he was saying to one of his sales guys that I was an unusual technical person and that they should invite me to the “kill.” I may well have misunderstood what was said, and there may not actually have been any opportunity for me to influence what happened subsequently, but I think I responded again with a kind of frozen silence that was interpreted as a “no.”

Rather than saying, “no,” I think I was having some kind of experience like “I don’t even understand what that means” mixed up with “well, that would be a good thing to learn about” and all of it just getting stuck. I feel as though I was briefly on the verge of being brought into a more detailed understanding of the sales process that I forfeited by freezing in the silence.

So what was happening in these situations? I think that they may be related to a need to have permission, likely rooted in my English childhood that was focused on compliance with rules. When the rules or permission structures are unclear, I sometimes don’t know what to do. Although I may identify something that I want, sometimes I find it challenging if I can’t have it “officially” bestowed upon me. Happily, I usually recognize that there are many other ways to approach such a thing. Even if no-one will grant me permission, I usually have ways to justify pursuing what I want. These two examples seem to be glitches where that process broke down.

This situation is somewhat ironic, since I have spent many years doing research, where the whole point is that no-one understands what all the rules are. And indeed I find that I’m happiest when I am working in an intellectual area where things are kind of a mess, so there’s an opportunity to discover, explain, structure, clarify.

In these two examples, I think there is something that Ezra Pound expressed in the line, “a slave is a person who is waiting to be set free.” That line risks minimizing the brutality that was inflicted on enslaved people to keep them in their place, but it does capture something about the idea that we are often held down by our conventions or our understandings of what is OK. It is sometimes remarkable how much we can accomplish by simply pursuing the things that we want in a determined way.