Crazy

Last week I shouted a couple of unacceptable words in the hallway outside my office, hung a bright red “Danger” sign on the door to my office and closed it for nearly an hour.

A few minutes later I was one of the half-dozen recipients of a terse email from an attorney. It read, in its entirety, “I want a conference call Monday.”

I hit “reply all” and responded, “And I want a pony and a bunny rabbit.”

What I found interesting were the repercussions from my childish behavior: None.

True, nobody knocked on my door while the danger sign was up, but otherwise – nothing, nada, no comment, business as usual.

This isn't the first time nothing happened. Several years ago on another job, I responded to a particularly egregious act of managerial hubris by screaming a passage from Revelations and throwing my desk chair down a stairwell. I spent the next several months working on the floor of my office, using a toy robot to carry papers out to my secretary.

I got some sideways glances, not so many invitations to lunch, but mostly it passed without comment. To her credit, my boss did offer to buy me a new chair.

Don't get the idea that I act crazy often. It's actually pretty rare, but I can see why it happens and how some people get addicted to it. I fully subscribe to the Star Trek wisdom, “In an insane world, the sane man must appear to be insane.” My crazy fits happened because I didn't know how else to act. What do you do when you find yourself in a world where the familiar rules of the game disappear?

Imagine, for instance, you are quarterbacking a team in an ordinary football game when you realize the scoreboard says it's 5th down and 10 light years to go, and the referees are riding camels and are waving bratwursts at you. What play do you call? I don't know about you, but I'd say junk the SALT agreements and go nuclear.

There have always been a few people around who never quite understood what was going on. Ever since I can remember we've had a colorful, slightly scarey, lunatic fringe that added spice and – occasionally foresight – to our society. For instance, I never believed the conspiracy buffs who thought a multi-national corporation, owned by a foreigner, could overtly put American politicians on its payroll and dominate the news and opinion business. That was ludicrous in light of the rules as I understood them.

The so-called “J-Curve Theory” describes crazy behavior by much more than just a fringe. It's the product of historical studies that found revolutions don't happen while things are getting worse, they happen when things start to get better. People get disoriented, sort of catatonic, when everything is falling apart. But when the scoreboard is re-set, the camels are gone, a new set of referees come in and the quarterback finds out it's really 3rd down – but there's still a lot of tough yardage needed for a first down; that's when the players start kicking the refs.

"Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you," said Carl Jung, the man who invented modern psychoanalysis.

I say, show me a crazy man and I'll show you somebody who's had the rules pulled out from under him.

I did dial into the conference call last week. But as of today: no pony, no bunny rabbit.