Two years ago, over on the BBC, news anchor Pam Caulfield was wrapping up her segment. Apparently, she had an extra few seconds to kill. Having nothing to say or do, she pretended to type on her keyboard as the credits rolled. If you can find the clip, it’s like she’s pantomiming tickling the ivories of a real keyboard. Of course, the audience noticed this. They wrote articles ridiculing her in the media. She was tied to the gossip columns’ whipping post all week.
But what exactly is wrong with this? Truth be told, this is common in many industries, especially ours. The lawful name for this is fudgeling. Filling the dead air with… something. The appearance of work. The whirring of nondescript clockwork. You convert your keyboard to an air guitar.
Picture this: Your region has bad weather, and everything is horribly delayed. The dispatch manager put out the booking block 90 minutes ago. You simply have too many clients stuck at the airport on your home turf. You know the drill. A few diversions, several cancellations, a handful of rebooks, and the numerous clients turning back from the airport because the airlines said, “not today, Charlie.” Then worse comes to worst. Your major New York affiliate calls. They know your name by voice and so do you. Every dollar your company grosses, they can claim 12 cents of it. They need an SUV and they need it now.
What’ll you do? I suppose in a utopian society one would tell the truth. “Sorry, we’re booked. The weather gummed us up.” But you can’t. You don’t have the luxury of doing the moral thing. Or I should say, the honest thing. That’s not it either — the immediately honest thing. Is it a lie to steel your nerves before you drop the bad news? Put it another way: if someone has a legal right to your left foot, do you have to personally saw it off before the judge reads the contract? So, you fudgel. First you start air typing and mumbling to yourself. Then you hit the trusty hold button. On hold you take a bite of your pastrami, tap out a drum solo, or play trash can basketball. You run to the bathroom. You finish your Facebook argument with your ex. I know what you’re thinking. It goes against the absolute moral order of the ticking clock.
Cutting to the chase. Telling the truth. Dropping the bomb. Limbo, you’ll recall, was not the top prize at God’s carnival. But you won’t just tell them. How could you? It’s the rule for all animals with a nervous system obey: fight, flight, or freeze. Why not freeze time? And how can you not? The alternatives will logjam your decision-making. What if you pawn the caller off on a coworker? What if you leave them in suspense? Cut them off? Give them false hope? Fight and flight both fail. So there is immense relief in fudgeling. How long do you dare to stall? That’s what’s funny about fudgeling. You can go your whole life fudgeling. Someone, somewhere, has the world record for the longest fudgel ever fudgeled. What’s the downside? If you tell the truth, time restores. You get to move on. The truth can, literally, set you free. Hard to call it. Time is money. And it’s client triage time. You are trying to get a VIP family back home, but Steve the Stranger is on line 4 offering you $2,800 to get him to Cleveland. Randy the referral has a sob story and just got bounced to you, the third provider he’s called. Oogie the Uberer is on line 5 and wants you to bump a regular customer for him, a one-time customer who doesn’t know how to plan. Are you feeling the squeeze? Might you feel an impulse to push that HOLD button after all?
There’s no science of fudgeling. Nor is it really an art, exactly. It’s a craft — one tool in the toolbox. A way of reclaiming the dead time, the decision-making paralysis. And like any tool, you can use it right or lop off a finger. There’s no right answers here. And don’t think your company will give you any guidance. There’s no policy, no protocol that resolves the situation. It’s a true dilemma. From Greek “di-” for two, and “lemma” for proposal. The gods have put before you two equal propositions and expect you to contemplate as they would. But you and me have a much harder time hefting the weight of these decisions than do the gods.
Which is the true reason we’re compelled to fudgel. Not because we’ll come to a decision soon. But imagine for a few moments what it’s like to live in a world where a decision was easy to make
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