Always Talk To Strangers
Lots of students turn up here at BBC Scotland looking for career advice. The majority want to become journalists. In a bygone era we would have simply set the hounds on them, but not in these days of Corporate Social Responsibility. Now I’m expected to waste half an hour of my valuable staring-into-space time giving them “a steer in the right direction”. I’m sure most of them would prefer the hounds.
My advice for would-be journalists could be summed up thus: find stories. Of course I have to spin this out for thirty minutes so I also tell them they must ignore everything their parents ever taught them…well, maybe not everything. I mean, running with scissors is still a no-no, but forget that stuff about not talking to strangers. Strangers, you see, have stories to tell. You just have to get them talking and then – and this is the hardest part – you have to listen to what they’re saying.
At this point in my spiel I often have to click my fingers and wave a banana in the air to make sure the student in still paying attention. That’s when I share my very own trick of the trade. It’s a technique I developed after spending four years studying Sigmund Freud’s theory of psycho-analysis, followed by ten more years messing about on the internet. Freud, you will recall, believed that information from our sub-conscious mind could be revealed in our dreams or in slips of the tongue during everyday conversation. Now forget Freudian slips and imagine that every word said in a conversation was being transcribed immediately onto a web-page and that certain key-words became hyper-links into other pages of information. Hyper-links into the sub-conscious perhaps?
Are you still paying attention or do I need to fetch a bigger banana? No? Good.
So now imagine we’ve just met and are having the following innocuous conversation:
Me: Are you planning a holiday next year?
You: Not sure…it depends if we can afford it. Of course the kids would love to go to Disneyland but I don’t like flying.
Now, in the space of seven seconds, I’ve discovered three things about you; you worry about money, you’re a parent and you are scared of flying. You’re also coming across as a bit of whiner, but we’ll let that go for the moment. Instead I’ll use my next question to click on one of your verbal hyper-links.
Me: Why don’t you like flying?
You: Well…I was once in a hi-jack situation and…
And, hey presto, we have a story. That was easy wasn’t it? Maybe I should have clicked on one of your other links.
Me: How much would that Disneyland holiday cost?
You: Thousands…but I’m thinking of robbing a bank next week…
You see…it never fails. But let’s prove it.
Me: So how many kids do you have?
You: Three hundred…I was part of a strange medical experiment in the sixties…
Well as any good Shrink would say, our time together is over, but for homework I want you to practise this technique on the next odd bod you meet in the Post Office queue or on the train.
If you're very lucky, it won't be me.
