The internet pedants will have their day
Rob Long
I was a guest on a television show a few years back, and I told a story about buying a used car. It was an old Subaru Outback, I explained, and when I bought it in 1988 it was already eight years old, with a rusted undercarriage and a perpetual oil leak.
“Subaru didn’t make an Outback back then,” about two dozen angry viewers tweeted at me the next day. “Why are you lying? What else are you lying about?”
THINGS THAT DON’T WORK AND HUMANS THAT DO
I tried to explain that it was a slip of the tongue. I own a Subaru Outback now, I replied, and it’s basically the same model as the one I bought in 1988. But some couldn’t let it go. “You need to be more careful with your words,” one person wrote, “especially because you’re a public figure.”
In other words, people can be real jerks about stuff. If you somehow blunder into someone’s area of oddly specific expertise, expect to hear about it. Correcting others in public is an irresistible temptation.
But it’s also important to know when to let things go. Sunday night, for instance, I was out to dinner with some friends. The restaurant was crowded and cheerfully noisy — it’s a popular Greenwich Village spot — and the place seemed filled with a happy and generous energy, which is not always the case in New York City these days.
Sunday, though, was the day of the New York City Marathon, when the city gathers along the avenues and cheers for friends and strangers as they run (and straggle, and limp, and half-jog) by. It’s an amazing and uplifting sight. New Yorkers are not famous for their public displays of supportive and encouraging behavior. Mostly we snarl and snap at each other as we pass. But on Marathon Sunday, we set aside our snipes and sneers until the very last runner crosses the finish line.
The restaurant that night was still in the afterglow of those positive vibrations. In fact, the hostess told our table proudly that the winner of that day’s marathon was seated at a booth in the back, celebrating his win with his parents.
This seemed unlikely. The winner of the marathon was a 6-foot Ethiopian named Tamirat Tola who broke the course record, finishing the 26.2-mile race in 2 hours, 4 minutes, and 58 seconds. A quick scan of the room did not reveal any tall, skinny African men.
The hostess told us that he and his parents had come without a reservation, but the minute she found out that he was the winner of the New York City Marathon, she pulled out all the stops. A table was quickly made available, food was sent on the house, and every effort was made to make sure that this important local celebrity was made comfortable. She was especially thrilled, she said, because she had only been in New York for a few months and this really made her feel like a New Yorker.
“He’s over there,” she said, “but don’t turn around all at once.”
She discreetly pointed to a table at the back of the restaurant where a perfectly ordinary-looking family — mother, father, and son in his mid-20s — were tucking into a (presumably free) entrecote de boeuf.
“Look,” she said, “he’s even wearing the medal.”
He was wearing a medal, she was right about that. Every participant in the race gets the same thing — a small, gold-colored medallion hanging by a purple and orange ribbon. About 51,000 people ran the marathon on Sunday, so the streets were filled with “winners.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
But she didn’t know that. She had been inside the restaurant all day and was a brand-new New Yorker, and a guy had walked into her place with a medal around his neck and she just went with it. In the din of the crowded dining room, she must have heard “I’ve just run the marathon” as “I’ve just won the marathon.”
Here’s what I didn’t do: I didn’t tell her that the young man feasting on a free meal didn’t have the long, sinewy body or the basically unhealthy BMI it takes to win a marathon. I didn’t pull out my phone and show her a picture of Tamirat Tola. I just smiled and said, “Amazing!” and let it go at that, confident that when she posts a picture of herself and the “Winner of the New York City Marathon” she’ll discover what I discovered about having a social media following, which is that they live to correct the record.
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.