Robert H Myers

I love a good idiom. Some are more obvious in their meaning than others and this one keeps coming up again and again at work.

“Duckies and horsies.”

Our founder deploys it any time we need to read the tea leaves and divine the future. He picked it up from a former mentor and we’ve used it enough that it’s become lingua franca around the office. This is fine until a new person joins our ranks and enquires about the origin and meaning.

After a little internet sleuthing I discovered it’s from a Peanuts comic strip.

The premise is Linus and Lucy are being pretentious assbags by using the ephemeral joy of pattern recognition in clouds to flaunt their knowledge of the esoteric.

Charlie Brown, being a simple rube, can’t feign such pretentiousness. He sees a ducky and a horsie. Not a mallard and a stallion. Not even a duck and a horse. He’s 8 years old. He sees a “ducky” and a “horsie” as that’s his primary experience with reality. But now, these two pseudointellectuals have him second-guessing the truth as he knows it.

In the workplace, the expression has become a mantra to call it like it is.
Don’t see what’s not supported by the data.
Don’t put your thumb on the scale.
Don’t pretend this pile of horse meat is actually filet mignon.
Drop false narratives as quickly as Snoop Dogg would like us to.

In the parable, “The Blind Men and the Elephant” a group of guys feel up a pachyderm and try to ascertain what kind of beast it is from the limited data they can interpret. One has a hold of the tusk, another the trunk, a third the tail, and so forth. Quickly, they disagree about the nature of the creature as their experiences are isolated and they can’t see the whole picture. Instead of putting their pieces together, they devolve into violence because have you met human beings?

It’s ok to see different things in the clouds. Maybe Jessica sees a bunny and I see Missy Elliot from her 1997 hit video, The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly) because I’m a man of culture, good taste, and visual acuity.

And it makes even more sense because where does rain come from? Clouds. I’m absolutely killing this fake cloud imagination game.

If I really see Missy, I should point it out and do my best to get Jessica to see it before the cloud floats on by. And I should try to see the bunny if it’s not obvious. We should work to come together on our findings.

So gang, when we do this one, it’s just “Duckies and Horsies,” ok?

Call it like you see it.