Wrong Room
©2024, George J. Irwin. All rights reserved.

Allow me to start with a quote, attributed to many including Confucius: “If you are the smartest person in the room, then you are in the wrong room.” Putting aside the idea that I could ever be the smartest person in a room—if you question this, just put me under the hood of a car and you’ll see how smart I am not—this discourse is not about being smart.

More years ago than I want to believe, I became part of a group that met once a month to tell stories to each other. Each month had a prompt word, which we could choose to follow or not. I took that as a challenge, either fitting something I’d already written to a prompt or finding and completing a story that would match it, or at least forming it sufficiently to be able to tell it in five minutes or less.

During the few years that this group stayed together, one of the members was invited to bring the group over to a local museum for an event on Valentine’s Day. This event did not celebrate the day; in fact, it was more of an Anti-Valentine’s Day gathering, for people that did not necessarily have the benefit of Cupid’s Arrow. The event organizers thought it would be a great idea to have some of us tell stories about our Romantic Disasters, of which I had plenty to choose from.

It was a terrible idea.

To begin with, we were in a gallery on the second floor, well away from the main events; a gallery with absolutely horrible acoustics. I was hardly audible to myself, never mind the few people who bothered to stop to hear what we were talking about. Then, we were competing with what was going on the next gallery, something called “Fast Friends” which was an attempt to get people who didn’t know each other to talk—an icebreaker. (I guess you could almost say, “How quaint,” in the age of online everything.) We might have been able to deal with that... except there was also a violin player present in the next room, and though they couldn’t hear our storytelling (I checked) we were almost drowned out. In addition, most of the storytelling regulars didn’t show up, no doubt put off by the idea of this being tied to an event that cost $15—no, we didn’t get a free pass, at least I didn’t-- versus the usual cost of attending storytelling, which was zero. We did get some people stopping by to listen, but only eleven storytellers when we easily could have used twice that many for a multi-hour event. On top of that, there was no sign or other indication that what we were doing was part of the event; for all anyone else knew, we were just a group of people talking among ourselves. And finally, I just don’t think anyone who had come to commiserate about what a miserable day Valentine’s Day was did not really want to hear about anybody else’s misadventures, and if they were at all interested, it was for a shorter timespan than the three to five minutes that we normally allowed ourselves to tell a story.

In summary, we were literally in the Wrong Room.

Now, that does not mean that there was anything wrong with the stories that we collectively told. In fact, I went on to post the particular story I told, Lucky Sweater, onto my website, where it’s received tens of views.

It also doesn’t mean that there was anything wrong with the people who were attending the event.

There is a certain irony in the idea that on Valentine’s Day, we didn’t have a match. But it’s accurate.

Has this ever happened to you?

I would imagine the answer to that is, “Lots of Times.” That’s certainly true for me.

So the next question you might have is, “How does this happen?” This is where I suppose my experience as a Six Sigma Master Black Belt can be useful. And no, it’s not karate, it’s process improvement. Part of our training is to look carefully for root casuals.

In the case of the Anti-Valentine's event, I think it was just circumstance, and nothing more.

One answer is unrealistic expectations. Certainly the storytelling group had them with respect to the Anti-Valentine’s Day event, and perhaps the organizers did also. As I recall, there wasn’t a second attempt made of this concept, with or without storytelling. But there's a strong element of it just being circumstances, as in, These Things Happen.

I also have a more personal example. If you’ve talked to me, or perhaps noted this in one of my speaker introductions, you probably already know that I’m a model railroader, which is a more elegant, nicer and far more accurate way of saying that “I play with trains.” Small size ones, that is, more precisely, N Scale, which is one-one hundred and sixtieth actual size. N is generally considered to be the second most popular scale, far behind the most commonly used size, which is HO Scale, one-eighty seventh proportion of real life. (Neither of these are the Lionel Trains that most people associate with the hobby.) It’s probably been about twenty years now since I was on what is called a layout tour, where you open up your home layout to visitors who are also model railroaders. My layout wasn’t anywhere near done—in fact, it never was completed before it was dismantled—but there was enough in place to be talked into presenting it. It didn’t matter whether it was finished or not, it turns out, because the two most popular comments were, first, “Isn’t that cute” and second, “You should get real models instead of these toys.” I knew that there were plenty of HO Scalers who looked down their nose at smaller sized trains, but I didn’t think for a minute that the open house would turn my very own basement into the Wrong Room.

Another answer is that we can make things into the Wrong Room all by ourselves. I was at an event a few years after the storytelling group faded away, at which a number of newly published authors had a chance to read from their works. One of them asked me if I’d been published and I said that I basically hadn’t been, and that I was okay with that. That, to put it mildly, did not sit well. Oops, George, you just created your own Wrong Room.

I suspect you’re already familiar with another way this can happen—someone else wants to make sure that it is their Right Room and if anything or anyone gets in the way, or is perceived as possibly getting in the way, then make sure that those others feel they’re in the Wrong Room. At the extreme, this is “You’re either with us, or you’re the enemy,” but fortunately, I don’t think it goes that far... most of the time. It’s more like taking over conversations, or using body language to make someone feel unwelcome. A page on the Psychology Today website has “Fifteen Control Tactics of Difficult People,” some more direct than others, and some so subtle that you often don’t know what hit you, but you do feel something’s not quite right about your presence. And no, that’s certainly not about the highest and best.

Fact finding aside, it still hurts. You can bet I didn’t want to bother with another layout tour after my experience with the single open house I hosted in my train-filled basement. And I never did have another one, although I did have smaller, less random groups over to see the layout. As for the encounter with published authors that didn’t agree with my point of view, that just made me feel more isolated at a time in my life when I was already plenty isolated. The song “Out Here On My Own,” first made popular through the late Irene Cara’s 1980 recording of it for the soundtrack of the film Fame, captures this feeling very well: wondering not where you fit in, but whether you fit in at all.

And you’re going to encounter a lot of Wrong Rooms during your time here. Sometimes this is just by happenstance—“wrong place at the wrong time” is a cliché based on actual events—and sometimes it could be of our own, or someone else’s, making. I would be here all day bringing up generally unhelpful sayings like “Every date that doesn’t work gets you closer to The One.”

So what does one do when confronted with a Wrong Room? Well, ideally, one could leave, but that’s not always possible or gracious. It would have been bad form for me to close down my layout open house early, even though I wanted to.

You might also have heard some advice from the Bible. There are more versions of this than I thought, so I’ll just use this one from the New King James Version: “And whoever will not receive you nor hear your words, when you depart from that house or city, shake off the dust from your feet.” The context of this is the Sending out of the Twelve Apostles that takes place in Chapter 10 of the Gospel of Matthew, and specifically what they were to do if they weren’t being heard. For us, trying to make our own happiness or unhappiness—see, had to sneak a Principle in here—is probably not the same thing as attempting to preach that “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”

First, I think, determine what kind of a Wrong Room this is. Is it life-changing or no big deal? Is it innocuous or harmful? Then, be honest with yourself: is there anything you did purposefully to wind up in it? My ego definitely got in the way in the published author event. I did not need to make the conversation about me when asked if I were also a published author. I could have just said no—which is a complete sentence, as Colleen would hasten to point out-- and returned to recognizing the achievement of the person who was talking with me. It was their night, not mine.

Another question is one of perspective, as in, do you have the right one? And for an example of that, we have the song “The Greatest,” recorded by Kenny Rogers among others, and written by Don Schiltz—the same man who also wrote the song “The Gambler” which was arguably Kenny Rogers’ signature song. It’s told from the perspective of a little boy who is trying to play baseball all by himself, but can’t seem to toss the ball up in the air in a manner sufficient to be able to hit it. Well, that’s what we’re led to think, until the tables turn and the little boy boasts that “Even I didn’t know I could pitch like that.” We can perhaps learn a lesson from that: there may be times when you can turn the Wrong Room into the Right Room, or at least the Not So Wrong Room.

And that quickly leads to the question, well, what is the Right Room?

Molly Rockwell, the third wife of painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell, once said that the woman she admired most was the author Jane Austen, who is perhaps most famous for the novel Pride and Prejudice. She said, “She contented herself with wherever she found herself.” I’m not suggesting that we simply make do here. Perhaps instead we need to find the places where we are most contented. I’m not necessarily a believer in the phrase “Bloom where you’re planted” either. But I’m also a realist. In her biography of Norman Rockwell, Deborah Solomon states that he painted, most notably for 323 covers of the magazine The Saturday Evening Post, “an America rich in ‘social capital.’” That’s an interesting way to put it. It’s debatable whether we can call America rich in social capital now, although it’s certainly rich in social media. Need I mention how much easier and more efficient it is to wind up in the wrong room online than in real life?

Being contented might be just fine, but let’s stretch and perhaps take ourselves out of our comfort zone: seek out situations where you are genuinely valued. Kobe Simmons is an American professional basketball player. After playing only his freshman year at the University of Arizona, he declared for the NBA draft in 2017 and has been a bit of a journeyman between the NBA and its lower level “G League.” I must admit I’d never heard of him until I saw a quote credited to him online: “A bottle of water can be fifty cents at the supermarket. Two dollars at the gym. Three dollars at the movies and six dollars on a plane. Same water. Only thing that changed its value was the place. So the next time you feel your worth is nothing, maybe you’re at the wrong place.”

And let’s not forget what is perhaps the most important point: being and feeling valued starts inside you. By feeling valued I don’t mean feeling egotistical. But I do mean understanding that should you enter a Wrong Room, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are the wrong thing about it.