Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

Well, it certainly has been a productive week here at the Wakefield Doctrine blog. What with our PWAT* questions nearly complete and some interesting insights on ‘kitchen performance’ (Considerer?…we all totally knew that you would do that before really starting to cook…)  and ‘animal husbandry’ (Christine, too bad you’re not old enough to have enjoyed the old TV Series ‘Green Acres’ you would like it) …we have a lot to go over as we head into the long weekend. Michelle and Denise are hard at work on additional questions and Cyndi is trying to find a way to get the Doctrine into her Lesson Plan this Semester (“…lets see, math class? roger…history?…roger…civics?…roger!  oh wait!  recess?  …scott!!!!  and nap time, clark“). Hey Stephanie!!  we loved your answers to the first set of questions, we would like to hear from you on scenario… you too Dyanne and Chris  come on!  how you gonna earn one of our fabulous, nearly free Wakefield Doctrine docTees? huh? how?  We invite you all to send us any suggestions for scenaria  with or without Answers. The object of the PWAT is, through the use of familiar, everyday  situations, to elicit the Readers instinctive response (to these situations). Following each of these ‘scenaria’  will be three responses. Readers will be asked to choose the ‘Answer’ that most feels right. There are no right or wrong answers and the (suggested) response may not be quite how one would respond, but it is about which Answer resonates most for the Reader. So lets get right into the latest collection.

(If you’re looking for Finish the Sentence Friday, the ‘Ladies inRead’ are taking the Labor Day Weekend off (of course)… but be sure to go by and see Janine and Kate and Stephanie and Kristi... theys always up to something!)

1)  You’re in class one Friday afternoon in October. You are in the middle of the quarterly exam and you are glad you were prepared for the test. You look over and notice that  your best friend is looking at another persons exam answers, you immediately look away but then you notice your Teacher is about to catch your friend cheating. You immediately:

     a) stand up and ask to be excused to go to the bathroom;
     b) start laughing in a very loud voice or
     c) do nothing, you need an ‘A’ on this test or you won’t get in to Medical School

 

2) You’re out on a double date with your best friend. While sitting at the table,waiting for the band to come on stage, you notice that, when they don’t think anyone is looking, your friend’s date is flirting with your date. Will you:

     a) take your friend aside and tell them what you suspect and offer your support;
     b) take your friend’s date aside and tell them that if they keep it up you will kick their ass or
     c) feel embarrassed for your friend and don’t do anything, except when you over-compensate you end up looking like you’re flirting with your friends date…

 

3) (from Friend of the Doctrine,  Christine): ( True story).    Scenario: Sitting in a “restaurant” (Step above fast food. Order at counter, but some workers roaming the place asking if you want refills or more breadsticks.) alone, you notice some thug-looking teenagers taking turns stealing tips off of tables. What do you do?

     a) stand up and tell them to put all the stolen money back;
     b) tell the counter person that, while you might not be 100% certain, you are pretty sure there are people in the restaurant stealing tips or
     c) call 911 on your cell phone (speed dial) and return to enjoying your meal

 

4)  (from DownSpring Considerer... here is one of 4 that she was kind enough to send us and is “… heavily edited” ): You’re at home waiting for a telephone call. Your favourite relative, who you haven’t seen in years, is coming to visit and promised to call as soon as they got into town, for final directions to your house. The phone rings, so rather than let it go to the answering machine, you pick it up and say, “hi’. The telemarketer seems delighted to hear an actual person’s voice and immediately launches into their pitch, “Hi! Am I speaking to the member of the household who makes the decisions about how happy your family will be?”
You…

     a) Listen politely to the spiel until you have a moment to interject, at which time you explain that you don’t want to buy into their service and try to negotiate the conversation to a swift end.
     b) Leave the phone off the hook, and walk away, coming back five minutes later to hang up if they’ve stopped talking by then…remember that you are waiting for a call, get angry and, without picking it up, shout at the phone   (“Can’t you see I’m waiting for someone?”).
     c) Start swearing at them, notice that the telemarketer is still on the line and seems to be getting upset…stay on line asking personal questions about their family, savouring the outrage you sense when you suggest they engage in an anatomically impossible sex act…hang up, laughing

 

5) You’re in a Supermarket checkout aisle; there is one person ahead of you and two behind you in line. It’s late on a weekday afternoon, people are all getting their mid-week grocery shopping done. While you are focused on the magazine rack opposite the checkout counter ( One newspaper is stating, ‘Obama and Rhianna are siblings born on the Planet Osiris’),  another shopper ‘cuts in line’ in front of you.  You:

     a) Look to see if anyone else in line noticed. Try to figure out why someone would be so rude and whether you should confront them or maybe tell the person behind you that the line will be delayed and aren’t people rude these days…
     b) Tap the offending shopper on the shoulder, tell them (nicely) that there are people in line and ask them, do they understand the normal protocol of lines? You say this with a smile and a genuine sense of wanting to help the person understand how they should behave in a checkout line.
     c) Establish eye contact and smile and shake your head in a ‘no, don’t do that’ gesture. (if the person is an attractive member of the opposite gender, make them stand immediately ahead of you in line).

 

6) (courtesy of DownSpring Michelle) You’re out for dinner with your spouse and another couple. The restaurant is new and very popular, so popular that there is normally  a 3 month wait for reservations. But you have a client who has connections and you were able to get in with very little delay, much to the impressed delight of your spouse and your friends. The dinner is all that you hoped it would be, outstanding cuisine and everything perfect and then as the server is pouring your coffee at desert they are jostled by a passing customer and spill coffee in your lap. You:

     a) scream loudly (if female)…shout loudly (if not) look around the table and the nearby tables and decide whether to play it for laughs or simply the fun of making the server cry (if female) get mad and storm off (if not)
     b) apologize to the server while trying to determine who might be to blame. Failing that, consider the possibility that either the server simply made a mistake or has a flawed personality
     c) feel embarrassed…feel like people are staring…apologize to the nearest person  …hate yourself for ruining the server’s evening (Optional)

 

7) You’re alone in your car, driving home late at night and you notice an SUV in the woods by the side of the road, it’s emergency flashers are on, steam is billowing from under the hood, clearly it has run off the road. You immediately:

     a) Pull over, get out of your car (hopefully remembering to put it in ‘Park’) and run towards the car shouting “Hey! Is everyone alright in there”
     b) Slow down and watch your rearview mirror until you see someone else pulling over, then speed up so that you can get to where the cell phone reception is strongest so that you can call for back-up
     c) Look to see if you recognize the vehicle, when you see that it has out-of-state plates, look at your watch then pull over and get out of your car, but stay where you are parked so that you can wave down the passing cars, ignore the screams for help and try to decide if the Good Samaritan laws apply to engineers

 

8) (Considerer for the next three…come on people, help the girl out!) You are at the Wildlife Park (a local family attraction), you notice a small boy kicking up a fuss, he appears lost and is clearly getting increasingly distressed, all at once he begins screaming for his Dad and looking around frantically. Do you:

     a) Watch him from a distance, pleased as other people step in to try to help the little chap.
     b) Walk up to him, put your hand on his shoulder, look him in the eye and reassure him that you’ll help him find his father, simultaneously scoping the area for a member of staff to tell that there’s a lost child.
     c) Join in with the crowd of other people saying nice (but largely ineffective) things as he zig-zags past you all.

 

9) You’re out on a second date when he/she starts talking in depth about a highly technical game they like to play. You don’t understand a word of what they’re saying. You…

     a) Listen attentively and tell them you’re glad they have something in their life that they’re so passionate about, and which brings them such pleasure. You either try to genuinely follow what they’re saying, or at least look like you do.
     b) Tell them outright that it’s not something you understand, in such a way that (you hope) doesn’t lead to a more in-depth explanation from them.
     c) Listen carefully for an opportunity to re-route the conversation onto topics about which you’re more knowledgeable. If they’re being particularly boring, re-route the topic of conversation into an area where you can show off your own technical expertise, and use lots of long words to prove the point.

 

10) You’ve been there for 3 hours, there were two rows of waiting patients when you arrived, that was reduced to half the number (of waiting patients) but now you (still sitting there) detect a noticeable increase in the number of people coming into the waiting room. You:

     a) sigh… and say
     b) scream… and shout
     c) pout…and whine

Alright!  5 or 10 more and we be done!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Saturday!!  New Question!!  From our Friend Janine:

11) It is breakfast time and your oldest child is having their first meltdown of the day over not wanting to finish their breakfast. What do you do?

a) God help me, it is only 9 am and she is already crying over something and walk away.
b) Try to reason with her and make a deal that if she eats 2 more spoonfuls, we will go to the park.
c) Whine and cry that you don’t like breakfast either.

* lol, no!  seriously!  it stands for Predominant Worldview Assessment Test… honest!  no,  Dyanne you should be ashamed of yourself for that

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

Same format as Monday. A (reprint) Post for the New and/or Casual Reader and (below that) the current list of questions, answers and scenaria.

(…Doctrine on the move! This just in: we have Christine promising a ton ‘o scenario, Considerer totally ….er excited about the…enhancement of her first questions. We have three more, they will be showing up real soon…also Michelle checked in and she is all over the scenario thing, Cyndi let us know that she is de-canting a case of positively captivating questions and answers! Fun? Here?  yeah, sure! of course!)

The goal is to present our Readers with 15 familiar, interesting and intriguing life situations. The Reader is asked to choose from three responses/reactions to the situation. At the end of the Test, all they have to do is add up their score and they will know which, (of the three) is their predominant worldview. With this knowledge they might then have the insight to know that they might be:

• An Outsider? (that would be a clark…born to see the world and all the people as separate, familiar but un-related, as being ‘out there’ external to where they are) or
• maybe a Predator (scott!! born alert… always on the prowl, literary, figuratively, sexually and constantly resting only when tired finding excitement anywhere they can find it or cause it among the people they meet, who are, in turn stronger Predators …or prey… or clarks) Hey! you might be one of them or
• if the score indicates (and if it is a score, then it must reflect the truth!) our Reader may confirm what they probably already knew, they are a Member of the Herd (a roger is a person who lives in the world where things add up, everything is accounted for, surprises are for the lazy and everyone belongs…except for some people and except, of course, for those very pushy, hyper-active but somehow attractive and sexy predator people, and them! they are so easy to control!)

So for our Guests, following is a Post that saw the light of day back on January 18, 2011:

 If you vote for me, all of your wildest dreams will come true. (Pedro)

At the very real risk of compounding a series of bad (editorial) choices, I am leaving the following to “run” as today’s Post. There were a number of technical difficulties associated with it that normally would have had me throwing the whole thing on the ground and starting over, but I liked the video and couldn’t stand to part with it (Post-wise).

In any event, if you are a New Reader?  better get used to it. There is a universe full of entertaining, informative, well written blogs available at the mere click of a mouse, and there is the Wakefield Doctrine.

Now that I see the words in ‘print’ I just had another satoristic  moment, a new appreciation of this thing of ours!
I’ll bet you that on a good percentage of the Posts that get published, this place looks like a scott’s house/apt.  Bear with me here, I know what I mean to say, not sure how to put it. I’m talking about the ‘tone’ or style, maybe of these Posts; I am thinking that some of them will be kinda scottian. No one element that I can point to, a certain frenetic quality, impulsive un-orderly way of attempting to make a point. That is not to say that scotts are not good housekeepers, (they are not, rogers are the good housekeepers), and not that scotts aren’t the most likely to be taken by curiosity, (they do have a streak of curiosity but it is clarks that are the eclectic of the three). But if you were to go into a scott’s house/room/workshop/library, you would find a really odd bunch of things. Nothing that would betray a need to be orderly, a lot of broken instruments, tons of magazines and not a few half-eaten sandwiches on plates at work benches (… you know a scott was working and eating and then something else caught their attention and BAM out the door). This is the den of a scott, eclectic without a need to preserve, variety without the drive to catalogue.

But I was starting to say, it just struck me that taken as a collection, these Posts are beginning to reflect, at varying times a clarklike consideration, a scottian impulsiveness and a rogerian formality!

Damn, maybe this frickin Doctrine is starting to work!
In any event, below is the ‘original’ Post for today.  ……see ya

Everyone knows the story of how the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers came to be known as the Wakefield Doctrine, right?  ( your monitor gets wavy, you come back into focus in…in  Hollywood?)

INT.      LATE MODEL LUXURY CAR –      NIGHT

Clark and Glenn are in animated discussion, it is clear that the topic is one they are both very, very familiar with and they are covering old ground

CLARK

Blah, blah blah…I know and you know and I know that the theory is valid and way, way more useful than most of the crap that you use for your trainings. When are you gonna incorporate it into one of your modules?

GLENN

Hey, I know its useful! I been in this car listening to you for the last 15 years, haven’t I?

CLARK

So what’s it gonna take to do something with this thing…what do you need to take it on the road? Hell, I know you’re already stealing parts of it to use in your presentations

GLENN

Credibility. Thats what it needs…If I go out there in front of my Board of Directors and say, “…and this new module is based on ‘the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers’ they will laugh.”

CLARK

Yeah, but…it works… it is useful…

GLENN

…And it sounds like it came out of a dorm room…from the 70s. I work in a corporate environment…credibility, empirical…metrics…you hearin this?

CLARK

I get it, I get it…fine! then I’ll change the name…you want credibility?…from now on the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers is…the…Doctrine, the Wakefield Doctrine!

GLENN

Fuckin yeah!

Now the work:

1)  You’re in class one Friday afternoon in October. You are in the middle of the quarterly exam and you are glad you were prepared for the test. You look over and notice that  your best friend is looking at another persons exam answers, you immediately look away but then you notice your Teacher is about to catch your friend cheating. You immediately:

     a) stand up and ask to be excused to go to the bathroom;
     b) start laughing in a very loud voice or
     c) do nothing, you need an ‘A’ on this test or you won’t get in to Medical School

2) You’re out on a double date with your best friend. While sitting at the table,waiting for the band to come on stage, you notice that, when they don’t think anyone is looking, your friend’s date is flirting with your date. Will you:

     a) take your friend aside and tell them what you suspect and offer your support;
     b) take your friend’s date aside and tell them that if they keep it up you will kick their ass or
     c) feel embarrassed for your friend and don’t do anything, except when you over-compensate you end up looking like you’re flirting with your friends date…

3) (from Friend of the Doctrine,  Christine): ( True story).    Scenario: Sitting in a “restaurant” (Step above fast food. Order at counter, but some workers roaming the place asking if you want refills or more breadsticks.) alone, you notice some thug-looking teenagers taking turns stealing tips off of tables. What do you do?

     a) stand up and tell them to put all the stolen money back;
     b) tell the counter person that, while you might not be 100% certain, you are pretty sure there are people in the restaurant stealing tips or
     c) call 911 on your cell phone (speed dial) and return to enjoying your meal

Lets add some more questions, new from our Contributors and from our original set.

4)  (from DownSpring Considerer... here is one of 4 that she was kind enough to send us and is “… heavily edited” ): You’re at home waiting for a telephone call. Your favourite relative, who you haven’t seen in years, is coming to visit and promised to call as soon as they got into town, for final directions to your house. The phone rings, so rather than let it go to the answering machine, you pick it up and say, “hi’. The telemarketer seems delighted to hear an actual person’s voice and immediately launches into their pitch, “Hi! Am I speaking to the member of the household who makes the decisions about how happy your family will be?”
You…

     a) Listen politely to the spiel until you have a moment to interject, at which time you explain that you don’t want to buy into their service and try to negotiate the conversation to a swift end.
     b) Leave the phone off the hook, and walk away, coming back five minutes later to hang up if they’ve stopped talking by then…remember that you are waiting for a call, get angry and, without picking it up, shout at the phone   (“Can’t you see I’m waiting for someone?”).
     c) Start swearing at them, notice that the telemarketer is still on the line and seems to be getting upset…stay on line asking personal questions about their family, savouring the outrage you sense when you suggest they engage in an anatomically impossible sex act…hang up, laughing

5) You’re in a Supermarket checkout aisle; there is one person ahead of you and two behind you in line. It’s late on a weekday afternoon, people are all getting their mid-week grocery shopping done. While you are focused on the magazine rack opposite the checkout counter ( One newspaper is stating, ‘Obama and Rhianna are siblings born on the Planet Osiris’),  another shopper ‘cuts in line’ in front of you.  You:

     a) Look to see if anyone else in line noticed. Try to figure out why someone would be so rude and whether you should confront them or maybe tell the person behind you that the line will be delayed and aren’t people rude these days…
     b) Tap the offending shopper on the shoulder, tell them (nicely) that there are people in line and ask them, do they understand the normal protocol of lines? You say this with a smile and a genuine sense of wanting to help the person understand how they should behave in a checkout line.
     c) Establish eye contact and smile and shake your head in a ‘no, don’t do that’ gesture. (if the person is an attractive member of the opposite gender, make them stand immediately ahead of you in line).

6) You’re out for dinner with your spouse and another couple. The restaurant is new and very popular, so popular that there is normally  a 3 month wait for reservations. But you have a client who has connections and you were able to get in with very little delay, much to the impressed delight of your spouse and your friends. The dinner is all that you hoped it would be, outstanding cuisine and everything perfect and then as the server is pouring your coffee at desert they are jostled by a passing customer and spill coffee in your lap. You:

     a) scream loudly (if female)…shout loudly (if not) look around the table and the nearby tables and decide whether to play it for laughs or simply the fun of making the server cry (if female) get mad and storm off (if not)
     b) apologize to the server while trying to determine who might be to blame. Failing that, consider the possibility that either the server simply made a mistake or has a flawed personality
     c) feel embarrassed…feel like people are staring…apologize to the nearest person  …hate yourself for ruining the server’s evening (Optional)

7) You’re alone in your car, driving home late at night and you notice an SUV in the woods by the side of the road, it’s emergency flashers are on, steam is billowing from under the hood, clearly it has run off the road. You immediately:

     a) Pull over, get out of your car (hopefully remembering to put it in ‘Park’) and run towards the car shouting “Hey! Is everyone alright in there”
     b) Slow down and watch your rearview mirror until you see someone else pulling over, then speed up so that you can get to where the cell phone reception is strongest so that you can call for back-up
     c) Look to see if you recognize the vehicle, when you see that it has out-of-state plates, look at your watch then pull over and get out of your car, but stay where you are parked so that you can wave down the passing cars, ignore the screams for help and try to decide if the Good Samaritan laws apply to engineers

8) You are at the Wildlife Park (a local family attraction), you notice a small boy kicking up a fuss, he appears lost and is clearly getting increasingly distressed, all at once he begins screaming for his Dad and looking around frantically. Do you:

     a) Watch him from a distance, pleased as other people step in to try to help the little chap.
     b) Walk up to him, put your hand on his shoulder, look him in the eye and reassure him that you’ll help him find his father, simultaneously scoping the area for a member of staff to tell that there’s a lost child.
     c) Join in with the crowd of other people saying nice (but largely ineffective) things as he zig-zags past you all.

Sitting in the waiting room of the urgent care center.

8) You’ve been there for 3 hours, there were two rows of waiting patients when you arrived, that was reduced to half the number (of waiting patients) but now you (still sitting there) detect a noticeable increase in the number of people coming into the waiting room. You:

     a)
     b)
     c)