In the top of the 9th inning of tonight's now-final World Series game, SC received a call from his alma mater -- the bachelor's edition (tune in tomorrow to find out where) -- asking for the only thing they really ever want to hear from you again for.
The fun thing about getting these calls is the embarrassing scripts that miserable work-study students are forced to read. When they say things like, "I see you graduated in 1998", it feels all warm and personal. Really puts you in the mood for opening your wallet. Ditto for "Let me tell you about our Alumni Fund".
There's an interesting sociolinguistic difference in reactions to getting this from businesses and students, though. When someone calls wanting to sell termite services, knowing that they're reading from a script doesn't create any kind of a personal connection. If anything, it tends to increase the social distance. But when it's someone from your school, unless you really hated it (and in high school, SC once was hung up on by a woman who said, "I wanted to forget I ever went there"), hearing them stumble through the script brings out sympathy.
Paradoxically, your host was actually moved by the dialogue that followed the patently ludicrous line, "Our most popular giving level is $150". A rough phonetic transcription of SC's response runs like so: Ah-hahahahahahahahahaha! This reaction is reinforced by the just-arrived annual report from the school; your host won't waste his evening counting the names up, but eyeballing the data is adequate grounds for skepticism. The student's reaction was, "Well, I had to try", a response so honest that it achieved the desired result. No, not that desired result. Just a small donation. Still more than your host was planning on at the beginning of the call.
One guy who called me had a script that said, "I see in the past that you've given $X; would you like to continue the tradition?" Only, X did not equal the most common amount I'd given, or even the most recent; it was, in fact, the maximum I'd ever given. Their trying to stretch the meaning of 'tradition' to mean "doing something at least twice, not necessarily consecutively, and not as a general rule" gave me a chuckle. "Would you like to *make* it a tradition?" would've been more accurate.
Posted by: Neal Whitman | October 28, 2004 at 07:18 AM