Hurricanes, monsters, and bears -- oh my!

Now I want pizza.

Xtre! Xtre! Read all about it!

Government-appointed, crony-connected "expert" fails miserably to deliver expected results!

Film of this unprecedented event at eleven!

Hey, this dude was obviously government-approved. He was up there with half the county government.

And scaring people with talk of monsters? That's a government job if I ever heard of one.

He probably got a bonus for that part.

Full disclosure: I lived in Manatee county for several years. My doctor's still there, along with a bunch of relatives.

I'd bet he was certified by the pool manager. "Hey, I think Fred knows that hand-wavin' stuff, and he could afford to host the next poker game if we gave him this gig."

Yeah, private companies never hire unqualified people or scammers. That sort of thing is unpossible in the free market.

I missed the lifeguard thing, at least at a conscious level. But yes, he's a county employee, so perhaps I retained in unconsciously.  I admit once I watched the video, which I did more than once, the content of the article wasn't what stuck most in my mind. 

"shooting his mouth off" was hyperbole-- but I stand by the statement. I think almost certainly he has spoken about his ability in the past and claimed a fluency he knows damn well he does not possess -- this is incredibly common with foreign languages. No way could this guy have thought he was anywhere close enough to fluent to translate -- his deaf brother surely disillusioned him about that long ago. He does not get out a single coherent thought -- not one. And watch his face. That is not the face of someone struggling to keep up (and surely if he was struggling to keep up, he could have asked her to speak more slowly) -- that is the face of someone who is bullshitting competence.

What say the rest of you? Watch the video, watch the captions of gibberish, watch his face. Either he sucks so bad he though he was doing just fine (in which case his brother has been fibbing to him greatly about his abilities), or else he is hoping to get away with the fakery.

Deaf people depending on that message for their safety could have died because of his "help." If he was any less than 100% certain of his aptitude he should have declined. Had he done so, the county might have looked for someone else to sign, or found some other way to communicate to the deaf community.

Yes, of course it is an assumption that he's bullshitting. . But it is one that IMO is supported better than any other. Here are the other possibilities, and why I reject them. You, of course, can do as you please.

(1) He took on the task in good faith, and only discovered in performing it that he wasn't up to the task.  I don't buy it. His face is perfectly calm. He pauses a second after she does on several occasions (doesn't scramble to catch up). He doesn't look like someone who knows he's in over his head. Such a person would probably look a bit harried and would be struggling to catch up, texting throughout her pauses or flagging her to wait, don't you think? But no -- he is signing authoritatively, stopping or repeatedly when she pauses as though to say, "I'm done signing, go on."  Also, given the importance of the message, if he volunteered for the task out of sheer eagerness to help, I would think that once he realized he wasn't up to it, he'd be anxious to convey that so they could find another way. As far as I've heard, the first inkling he wasn't up to snuff didn't come from him, but from deaf groups.

(b) He didn't realize even while he was doing it that he was in over his head and making such an abysmal hash of it -- only later, when deaf groups spoke up, did he realize it. That would explain his calm authoritative demeanor and his failure to alert them of his inability to perform the task.  But that would indicate that  his deaf brother, who surely has seen him sign, has for some reason chosen to never tell him of his failure to communicate -- to encourage him to think he's good at it,. And thus this guy really does think the signs for high winds and flooding are the signs for pizza and bear. Sad.

Perhaps he had the sign language equivalent of the Hungarian phrase book. (I'm posting this for you, Angie .). And brother never let him in on it.



(III.) The deaf groups criticizing his performance are just being meanie mcmeanies and really, it is a perfectly coherent translation. But no deaf people have bothered leaping to his defense.

I find it easier to believe he's like the job candidates I know of who put on their resume they speak French as a bit of what they think is harmless puffery, only to be unexpectedly confronted with a French-speaking interviewer.




Happens. All. The. Time.  Seriously, it does.  People talk about their competence at something, thinking it unlikely they'll be put to the test. If confronted, they have two choices: confess or bluff.   Butterfly Mcqueen made the right call and confessed.  But a surprising number of people try to bluff.

Sure I could be wrong, but given all the facts I know and can observe, thus looks like a brag and bluff situation to me.

Yeah, the lucky penny thing was...yeah.

I've totally been on both sides of your example, as the recipient of someone trying to communicate with me, and as me trying to communicate with my less-than-fluent Spanish or German, sometimes with more success than at others. And yeah, it's harder when you're put on the spot and under stress.

 But here's the thing -- in those situations, I didn't kid myself that I was clearly communicating a fluent message.  If the person clearly got what I was saying (got on the bus, turned the right way, etc.) I was glad. But if I wasn't sure they got it, and it mattered, I'd have tried to get them better help than mine.

Here, it's extremely hard for me to believe, looking at those captions, that even if the guy was a total optimist who waaay overrated his skills,he could have thought he clearly conveyed this important message.