I Stick
April 12, 2007 10:38 PM | 2

 

I appeared on the local news last night yet again -- I'm apparently becoming the city's spokesman for enraged Muni passengers, in part because of some tricks I've learned to me more media-friendly. It's almost by accident that this is happening; I don't know that much about transit, and I certainly don't want to care about Muni. I wish it would just work fine so we could use it when we need it, barely aware aware of its presence in our lives, the way we generally can with electrical service or fast food. One reason that they talk to me instead of a more qualified person like Andrew Sullivan at Rescue Muni is because I am in the city, and Andrew is in South San Francisco during the day. So that's kind of a fluke. But also, I'm very good at sound bites. In the piece that aired today, I say (more or less), "There's a barometer of Muni meltdownyness, and it's getting up to the point where people can't count on the trains and will start getting into their cars. And I think that's the worst thing that can happen for San Francisco." It's thanks to a book called "Made to Stick" that I'm getting good at quotable lines like these. In a nutshell, "Made to Stick" emphasizes that you can make your ideas stick in peoples' minds by keeping your meaning simple, including sensory details, and by saying something surprising that you then explain. It's probably my background in storytelling that leads me to add another aspect: an impending action, more commonly called "suspense." It's kind of dumb luck that the news interviews me at all, and also dumb luck that they happen to pick my particularly good lines to air. But it's handy to have sticky quotes at my disposal when I need them.