The Full Scoop on BS

Reading this book will be the most life-changing experience of your year. You may have just formed an opinion as to whether or not my opening sentence is BS. If you have, you may be right, wrong, or a bit of each. The problem is, you may not know, not yet anyway. First and perhaps most importantly, you may not know my statement is BS because you may not know what BS is? A lot of people don’t. This is well illustrated by a recent conversation I had with a friend I’ll refer to as Chas, chiefly because his name is Chas. About a month before I started writing this book, I went to a busy mall to use an automated bank machine. I drove my car into a parking space and walked about 30 yards to the mall, on the way running into Chas. I have issues with lazy people so when I saw a guy sitting in the driver’s seat of a car parked illegally in a fire route immediately outside the mall entrance, and jamming up the area for people trying to drive to nearby parking spaces, I walked up to the driver’s window for a few words. “I parked over there in a parking spot.” I said, making sure to keep a polite tone and smile, “You know why?” “No?” the unsuspecting driver said in a confused tone. “Because I don’t think I’m special and I’m not lazy.” Maintaining my smile, I then asked, “Get what I mean?” Were I alone, you can imagine what the guy may have told me to do. However, as I spoke with the driver, Chas was working and walked up in the police uniform he wears for what he and his colleagues call the job. So the driver said what he wanted Chas to hear: “I’m just waiting for my wife. She’s just in the drug store.” Perhaps his wife was physically disabled, which would have made me feel awful, “Geez, I’m sorry. Is she disabled?” More confusion followed. “Huh? No?” Then the driver, for the first time in our short exchange, thought. Then he drove to a parking spot. After I went into the mall, used the ATM and came out, the guy was standing outside the drug store waiting for his wife. He seemed in no mortal danger or discomfort I could see. He just sported an awkward grin. With fresh cash in hand, I lined up in a coffee shop within the mall to buy Chas a coffee; cops don’t get freebies nearly much as some might believe. Chatting with him about the exchange, from which he got quite a chuckle, I mentioned how easy it is to tell someone is BSing when they throw out a clear indicator of that. In the driver’s case, it was “I was just. . .” Chas is an experienced and committed cop, which means he is highly skilled at catching BS. So, I was surprised when he started talking about how cues for lies aren’t always correct. I agree and a growing body of research does too, but I wasn’t talking about lies. I was talking about BS, a whole other beast altogether. This isn’t to slam Chas. He and most of his colleagues are supposed to be very good at detecting BS and lies, and no doubt a lot of them are. Since Chas didn’t know the difference between BS and lies, though, and he sees a lot of both every work day, I figured a lot of other people probably don’t either. Soon after, my work here began. When people make statements or claims, tell stories or posit arguments, those on the receiving end do not necessarily know if what they are told is true and accurate. A lot of other people don’t care if it’s true so long as it’s something they want to hear. Such is the nature of BS. It is nothing new. It has been around since before any of us were us. It hasn’t changed in form since before there was a name for it. Easily accessible air travel makes many diseases far more contagious and by extension quite dangerous. In the same way, easily accessible media make BS far wider-spread and sometimes also quite dangerous. On the brighter side of BS, and there is one, it’s funny how many people get sucked into loops of self-perpetuating poop and how easy those piles are to avoid. Some people with little to no education have a skilled nose for recognizing BS. Others with several academic letters after their names eat up and regurgitate the stuff with reckless abandon. There is a very simple reason for this.