This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.
I was a guest on a television show a few years back, and I told a story about buying a used car. “It was an old Subaru Outback,” I explained, “and when I bought it in 1988 it was already eight years old, with a rusted undercarriage and a perpetual oil leak.”
“Subaru didn’t make an Outback back then,” about two dozen angry viewers tweeted at me the next day. “Why are you lying? What else are you lying about?”
Well, a lot actually. But in this specific instance, it was more like an honest mistake.
And I tried to explain that it was a slip of the tongue. “I own a Subaru Outback now,” I replied, “and it’s basically the same model as the one I bought in 1988.”
Some took that at face value and accepted the correction, but added, “Wait, you wrote on TV shows, you’re a producer and showrunner, are you seriously driving a Subaru? What happened? What bad decisions did you make?”
There are only so many things you can explain to people, I discovered, on social media. Or, actually, face to face, too. We like to pretend that social media is this uniquely difficult place to have a thoughtful conversation, but I’m not sure it’s all that much easier around the dinner table, or at a coffee place, or anywhere, really. So I just let the Subaru detractors do their detracting — detractors gonna detract, is my feeling — and went silent on the issue.
But some couldn’t let it go. “You need to be more careful with your words,” one person wrote, “especially because you’re a public figure.” Which is technically true but also a ludicrous thing to say, especially because right at this minute I am recording this in my underwear and I’m sorry but you’re just going to have to live with that image.
This is all to say: people can be real jerks about stuff. If you somehow blunder into someone’s area of oddly specific expertise, expect to hear about it. Correcting others in public is an irresistible temptation.
It’s also something young people like to do, loudly, in the office. Or annoyingly in the writers room, and I try to forgive that tendency because I have experienced that forgiveness myself.
Years ago, and I mean years ago, when I was a very young writer whose job it was to be very quiet unless I had a surefire pitch, we were working on an episode where a character was about to be arrested for launching a hostile takeover of a big corporation. There was more to it than that — and I had forgotten this incident until I saw a snippet of the episode recently on Instagram — there’s someone moving through all of the seasons of Cheers and posting little moments from each episode, along with synopses and notes, and so far he hasn’t had any trouble with the copyright police, which is probably because the new owners of the Cheers library are busy trying to buy the Warner Bros. library — so in the meantime I can scroll and relive very specific career memories, which isn’t really as fun as it sounds.