Do you tell the truth?
I was having lunch with a friend yesterday, who is looking for a job. She mentioned a three-month contract that would be a good temporary measure. It could turn into permanent so I told her to tell them she was interested in permanent, then just change her mind when the three months was up if she wanted to move on.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I made a decision a while ago that I would always try to tell the truth.’
I thought that was brilliant and it struck me that maybe I had underestimated her.
I woke up to telling the truth a few years ago. I went back to uni in my late 20s and had a kind of new professional outlook on the world. I had jobs where I had actual responsibility and wasn’t just thrown in charge of a workplace with a bunch of people who were just as incompetent as I was.
It’s a bit of a cliché to say the truth can set you free but I worked out what this meant when I was in a job where mistakes were often obvious and unable to be explained away or blamed on external factors. That’s right. In live radio, there’s no buck-passing.
I worked at the ABC as tech producer for a talkback show. I ran the desk, put phone calls to air and had to patch in news bulletins, the weather bureau or outside broadcasts. When things got a little boring, I would patch JJJ through to my desk and listen to it off-air.
Of course, one day I hit the wrong button. Instead of putting Trisha from Barmera to air, I think it was Magic Dirt who came on to join the quiz. Of course, it was only up for about half a second before I closed the fader and let Trisha have a go at guessing the capital of Peru. But when we went to a station ID, the presenter asked “What the bloody hell happened there?”
I knew I had fucked up and had no leg to stand on, nothing else to blame, so I just said plainly and confidently “Sorry, that was completely my fault.”
And it actually took the wind out of his sails a bit because by saying that, I’d apologised, acknowledged what I’d done and implicitly stated that I’d learned from the mistake and even felt a bit foolish for having made it. So he couldn’t really ‘tell me off’ when I’d already taken the rap for it.
It was quite liberating. Since then, I’ve accepted blame for all kinds of things: entire print runs have been pulped and re-printed because of me and I’ve put my hand up and said “That was my fault.” And it has actually made the whole process of fixing mistakes easier. If you can put your hand up and take responsibility, you can fix things a lot quicker than if you’ve spent even more time and energy covering things up.
Of course, I’m married now. So everything is my fault.