Flagpole

The Adlai Stevenson Game described in an earlier pencilgeist entry was not the first time a story has come out of a metasocial game. Consider this its prequel.

The summer after my freshman year of college I got a job with Habitat for Humanity in Morris County. Having been a volunteer for HfH before and having done a little construction work in my own right, my job was to train and lead groups of volunteers, freeing up the construction manager to work with other volunteers or attend to more advanced details. Seeing progress on our various construction sites over the course of the summer was fun, as was teaching my volunteer groups, but the best thing about the job was that it meant I was home for the summer. That meant, of course, recreating the things that were fun about high school: seeing old friends, eating at all the old places, playing all the old games.

On my first day back in town, high school was still in session, so John, Max, and I went back to CHS to find Buddy. Somewhere in the nostalgia it came up that Buddy, when suggesting something to do, often said “Let’s just run this up the flagpole and see who salutes,” using it to mean “Does this idea sound good?”

When school let out and we got a hold of Buddy, John brought up the flagpole expression, and Buddy denied having ever said it. This turned into an argument, with both positions becoming increasingly radical. John ended up at “You said it every day,” and Buddy at “I’ve never even heard anyone say it.”

The only way to settle the question was to ask other people we’d known back then what they remembered. Amazingly, it turned out that they fell on roughly the same lines, not just failing to remember or thinking he might have said it once or twice, but consistently insisting that he either said it all the time or not at all. The polling numbers split perfectly. Only Max stuck to a moderate position: that Buddy said it sometimes.

My position was and continues to be that he must have said it. It’s easy to imagine someone forgetting a friend’s catchphrase after it falls out of use, or a phrase being used only in certain company, thereby accounting for the split polling. It’s comparably hard to imagine John, Max, and I all independently inventing the memory of its repetition.

The disagreement was eventually dropped, but not the idea. A few days later Max, John, Shawn, and I were at Max’s house for a poker game. One of us called Buddy to invite him, but he said he couldn’t make it. A while later, John suggested calling him back to find out whether he’d be around later that night. I did, and when he answered I started with “Hey Buddy, let me just run this up the flagpole and see if you salute, poker later tonight?”

Buddy explained that he’d be with his girlfriend (Megan), and I relayed that to the group. Not satisfied, John called him, said simply “flagpole,” and hung up.

As this was happening, Max’s sister Kate walked in. She asked what was going on, and we walked through the context. “I have Meg’s number,” she offered, and in so doing set off the flagpole experiment.

Kate called Megan and asked her to say flagpole to Buddy. Megan was baffled, but acquiesced, and when Buddy reacted she was able to honestly say that it was not any of John, me, Max, or Shawn who asked her to do it. He didn’t guess Kate.

As we were laughing about this, Max’s mom overheard us and volunteered that she and Meg’s mom were friends. So, she called and asked her to find the two of them, repeat “flagpole,” and report back. She was a good sport and played along.

At this point, the joke was put aside for the night, but we realized later that the last move was particularly good because it involved enough of a workaround (Buddy wouldn’t, previous to her being involved, suspect us to be in touch with his girlfriend’s mom, especially not in such a way that she’d help carry out a practical joke) to make him wonder how big the conspiracy was.

A few days later Max and I discussed ways to expand on this and to make the game more interesting. Over the course of the following few days, we got in touch with a teacher I’d gotten along with in high school who agreed to write flagpole on the board as Buddy was entering class. We got a few friends from circles Buddy didn’t run in to drive past him on his way home from school and yell flagpole out their window. We got his friends to make a big deal of standing around the flagpole in front of the school at lunch time.

Once school let out, we adapted to the summer. Jimmy, who Buddy has yet to meet, took a picture of a flagpole with his cell phone and texted it to him with a message asking if he would salute. Kate had an envelope with official CHS letterhead, so we addressed it to Buddy’s parents and mailed him a diagram of an idea being run up a flagpole and several stick figures saluting. Max’s mom used her office stationary to mail him a photocopy of the diagram. John and I bought some miniature flags from the dollar store, scrawled “Hey Buddy” on them, and slipped them through the mail slot at his house at night.

Eventually, the game was dropped, and I’ve never asked Buddy what it was like to experience it from his end. My hope is that what started out as an innocent (if stupid) running joke became an astonishment, each new mention leading him to wonder how far we were willing to go to make the word reoccur. I’d like to think that somewhere between text messages from numbers he didn’t recognize and the flags slipped through his mail slot, Buddy began to see flagpole references in places we didn’t or couldn’t plan- finding them in the clouds, his mind racing back to the expression whenever someone happened to mention one of its parts.