Is This Anything? 15
More friends should have secret codes.1
If you're at a restaurant and the waiter asks "do you want desert?", you often have this weird back-and-forth where
1) you're trying to figure out if the other person(s) want desert,
2) you're aware of the waiter hovering over you hoping you do want desert.
Which means if you're high in agreeableness, or if the waiter is at all pushy, you'll end up with desert whether you collectively want it or not.
Other situations where I wish I had secret codes include "trying to figure out whether other people want to leave the party yet" and "someone or something is really annoying me and I want to be rescued."
One thing that complicates normal, un-secret question-asking is that it's often hard to differentiate someone asking something for their own sake and asking something for yours. E.g. if someone says "are you tired, do you want to go home?" they might be saying "you look tired" or they might be saying "I'm tired" or most likely "I'm mildly tired so I'm ready to go home if you are, but if you're having a good time still I don't want to drag you away." (In a sense the solution to this doesn't need to be secret codes, just short codes for each of the possibilities).
Through my colleague Caroline's excellent newsletter I started watching the detective show Elementary. It got me thinking: which jobs are most over-represented on scripted television? I estimated the TVland population of each job by taking the % of scripted scripted shows and applying it to the US working population; I geminied these numbers and haven't checked them, so take this as a fun thing not a true thing:
| Field | Real Life Pop | TV Pop | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Police | 800k | 32m | 40x |
| Medicine | 1.1m | 16m | 15x |
| Law | 1.3m | 8m | 6x |
Multiple sources claim 30%+ of scripted dramas are police procedurals, which is insane; I bet if you broke that down to police detectives vs real life population you'd get an even better ratio, but I can't find the stats.
[^1]: of course, I don't technically know how many friends already have secret codes, but my sense is few do.