The 10-second Rule

When a unit is deployed, there seems to be a suspension or at least a modification of some of society’s norms. One of these is the 10-second rule. The rule is simple: When you drop food on the floor, what you normally wouldn’t pick up off the floor to eat, you now have gained a 10-second “window” during which it will be perfectly normal to pick it up, dust it off or pick the particles out that you do not wish to ingest and continue eating. Sometimes, a phrase is muttered to invoke the rule such as, “Ten seconds, it’s still good,” or an even more childish pox on germs, “God made dirt and dirt don’t hurt.”

When I was between classes in flight school, I once did a month of “Casual duty” at the Army Aviation Museum. The museum had recently renovated their roof at the expense of millions of dollars to fix a problem that resulted from the building’s construction. With the repair/reconstruction complete, it was time to clean the exhibits, and that’s where we came in. As we began to clean each of the exhibits, we would notice flaws in them, and not wanting to be accused of damaging any exhibit, we would tell the curator about the problems. He would come out and look over the exhibit in question and pronounce that it was fine. I asked him if he was sure, and he told me about the museum 10-second rule.

Apparently, they’ve done studies and the average time any visitor spends looking at an exhibit is…ten seconds. So, in order to minimize the money and time for a museum to perfectly maintain an exhibit, it needs to simply be able to endure the generally unpracticed inspection of each visitor for approximately ten seconds.

My life with religion was a lot like that. Recovering from failures and problems, I would maintain many things in my life just like those exhibits, ensuring that they would pass immediate scrutiny. As long as everything looked okay, then, of course, everyone would assume that it was okay. And nobody else would look too closely at the other, unless their lives be scrutinized in return and their own flaws noted.

I find that we are all already aware that flaws exist in each of us. Why else would there be the need to suspend societal norms when we’re “away” from society? And why else do we as a society seem to pay so much attention to when someone else’s flaws are exposed, as if we didn’t know that there were already flaws. Maybe the ones we have aren’t those kinds of flaws, but then that exposes our own 10-second rules of one kind or another; either ten seconds of our own permitted exposure without acknowledgment or throwing up enough camouflage to endure ten seconds of examination.

Posted by: HarryTick™ on 5. July 2007, 18:24 |