I was halfway asleep on a very long plane ride when the flight attendant made a request. “Is there anyone on board,” she asked into the plane’s intercom, “who is a medical doctor?”
I suppose she’s had enough experience with pompous academics with Ph.D.s that she felt the need to specify medical doctor. How many times, I wondered, did a passenger raise his hand after hearing that announcement to say, ‘Yes, I am a doctor … of ethnic dance and music folkways.’ What she wanted was a real doctor, of course. There was a passenger in some kind of medical distress — I never did find out what it was — who needed help.
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Here’s the problem: For some reason, whenever I hear an announcement like that, I have an inexplicable and powerful urge to raise my hand and say, “I am a doctor. What seems to be the problem?”
Full disclosure: I am not a doctor. I barely passed my high school biology class. About the only thing I have in common with a real-life, certified medical professional is the belief that there’s a pill for everything. So why do I have this desire to pretend to be one? Especially when I know that there would be terrible consequences to pay when I was discovered, which would happen in about three minutes.
For that matter, why do I need to walk to the very edge of a high cliff and peer over it? I can see the view from a safe and sound 2 feet back, but I never do. Cliffside, rooftop, it’s always the same: I creep carefully to the edge and peer out and down and feel that shuddering butterfly feeling in my body as I look way, way down. I understand that boys exhibit this kind of behavior — I certainly did — but I am no longer a boy. I am a 60-year-old man who has been known to trip himself on a wall-to-wall carpet, so walking to the edge of a cliff or rooftop, or impersonating a doctor, is unwise behavior to say the least. The former can get you killed. The latter can land you in jail.
“Whatever you do, do not get out of the truck,” our safari guide in Botswana said as we parked next to a pride of lions. At which point I had the (nearly) irresistible urge to hop down from the truck and wander over to them for an up-close photo. For some reason, when I hear “Don’t do this,” or “Don’t get too close,” or “Don’t pretend to be a doctor,” or “That thing is plugged into the wall,” I have to fight the desire to do it, move toward it, pretend to be it, touch the sparking ends — you get the picture.
“Careful,” the waiter will say, “the plate is very hot.” The next move is preordained: I instantly touch the plate.
The French have a phrase for this kind of urge — I mean, of course they do. A country with 9,000 cheeses and 600 ways to prepare duck has a phrase for everything. They call it l’appel du vide — the call of the void. There is something about the cliff’s edge that dares you to investigate, to peer over, to flirt with jumping. That may apply to high ledges, but there’s nothing so dramatic about the slapstick outcome of a sitcom writer pretending to have a medical degree, or a hot plate of sizzling fajitas, that justifies such a lofty term. When I wanted to press the call button at my seat on KLM flight 592, I wasn’t hearing the appel of the vide. I was just wondering what might happen if I violated such a foundational rule of civilization. I was fighting the urge to test authority.
There are probably lots of deep psychological reasons for this behavior, and I don’t think I’m the only one with these impulses, but for me, I think it’s ornery contrariness, what the English call bloody-mindedness. You tell me not to do something, and I immediately want to do it. But, of course, I never actually do. I chicken out at the last minute. I wonder if the French have a phrase for that?
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.