Imposter syndrome and the ethics of faking it until you make it

Imposter syndrome and the ethics of faking it until you make it

  August 04, 2015    Stephen Cobb

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Public Domain Photo titled "Gist Inspector, Mrs" via pond5.com

The advice to "fake it until you make it" has popped up several times recently in my online meanderings, raising some interesting ethical and practical questions. I want to ponder them for a moment and present a couple of illustrations. Much of this relates to dealing with "imposter syndrome," a psychological glitch which causes us to doubt our own accomplishments and develop a fear of being exposed as a fraud despite evidence of our competence.

[Original article written 2015, expanded an re-edited 2025.]

Imposter syndrome and faking it

While I have experienced imposter syndrome a few times myself, I really started to think about it when I was doing some research for a friend who was trying to overcome their fear of public speaking. I found an article that had several pieces of advice, including this: "try faking it until you make it" where "it" equals "being a confident public speaker".

(BTW, I really do mean that I was doing this research for a friend and not myself. I do have my own problems with public speaking, but they are the opposite of lack of confidence, and more in the area of piping up too often and for too long, something I have been working on for many years: namely, knowing when to pipe down.)

Unfortunately, my very ethical friend interpreted the article as a recommendation to fake talking about something you don't know much about, that is, faking being an expert when one is not. The author of the article didn't really mean that one should engage in professional impersonation, I realized it could have been read that way. And my friend had a point: it is one thing to fake feeling confident, which is often the context in which this "fake it until you make it" phrase appears; but is it okay to fake a skillset until you actually acquire it?

For example, most of my writing these days concerns security (on We Live Security and on S. Cobb on Security). So, would it be okay to fake being a security expert until you became one? Many people would reflexively answer no. Yet even as I ask that question, I flash on the feelings I used to have in the early days of my career in information security, feelings like "I'm not really an expert" and "these people are taking a chance acting on my advice."

On the other hand, I never actually claimed to be a computer security expert, people just began to treat me that way, most likely because I wrote a book about computer security (after spending several years researching the subject and dealing with real world security problems, then covering the topic for IT publications and learning what I could from people whom I considered experts). 

(One thing I've come to realize about experts is that real ones are willing to say 'I don't know' when asked a question to which they don't have the answer. Some of my 'go to' responses when taking questions are "I don't know, but I know someone who might" and "I don't know, but I will do some research and get back to you.")

Fakery, posture, and honesty

It turns out that feeling like a fake in one's chosen profession is quite common—70% in one oft-cited study, even more in this recent work—and it may be more common for women than men. Why? I think that many societies teach males to fake their emotional state and self-image as part of growing up and earning a living. This is reflected in phrases like "Be a man!" which are directed at boys who are not yet men. 

Now, I've always been a firm believer that women can doing anything that men can do, as epitomized by the factory worker in the photo at the top of this post (she's measuring pipes with a large micrometer, a tool that will re-appear later in this blog post). However, it is quite possible that the way in which we are raised leads men and women to react differently to the phrase "fake it until you make it."

To get a different perspective on this, we can turn to TED, as in a TED talk, one that has been viewed by tens of millions of people. I recommend listening to the whole talk, but if you are pressed for time you could skip to the 15 minute mark. This is the point when Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist, gets into the issue of feeling "fake" in a professional situation (she talks about this in the context of research that shows how adopting certain physical poses with our bodies can change our physiology).

My opinion? There is a role for faking it until you make it, or better yet, as Amy Cuddy says, faking it until you become it. Let me give you an example that may account for my take on this. My grandfather faked it until he became an engineer, and by doing so he probably saved himself and his younger brother from a life of poverty.

The Micrometer Story

Ernest Tracy Cobb was born in England in 1894, the third of four sons in a modestly wealthy family. However, when my grandfather was 14 it came to pass that his father, also Ernest, sustained serious financial and property losses. That meant my grandfather, who tended to go by Tracy, had to go out and look for work to support himself and his younger brother. 

This was in Coventry, an industrial city in the British Midlands, a cradle of automotive engineering and the home of many classic car and motorcycle marques (e.g. Triumph, 1885; Lea-Francis, 1895; Humber: 1896, Daimler: 1896, The London Taxi Company: 1899, Rover: 1904, Sunbeam: 1901, Hillman: 1907,  and Jaguar: 1922).

The story goes that young Tracy was out looking for work when he saw a group of men queueing up outside a factory. He asked the man at the end of the queue what they were waiting for. Tracy was told there was a chance to get a job, but only if you could operate a micrometer, a device that my grandfather, a son of landed gentry, had never seen before.

But Tracy joined the queue and watched carefully as the foreman handed each applicant two objects when they got to the front of the line. One was a piece of metal and the other was a micrometer. The applicant was then asked to measure the piece of metal. By the time it was his turn, my grandfather had observed enough to handle the micrometer as though he knew what he was doing. He was hired, thus "faking" his way into a job. 

My grandfather went on to master many tools and instruments, eventually co-founding and building a successful tool-and-die making company. He retired quite comfortably in his fifties when he sold his quarter share of the firm, although he kept tinkering with machine tools, achieving a patent in 1961 for "a bearing for a table or slide of a machine tool or other apparatus having a v-shaped guideway" (GB867755A). 

In the past, when faced with challenging times, I have taken inspiration from this story about my grandfather. (It still makes me smile sometimes as I do my two-minute power poses that I learned from Amy Cuddy's video.)

At the same time, I endeavor to remain mindful of the need to avoid overestimating my abilities when making commitments to others. I also strive to keep in mind I'm lucky that my circumstances permit me to say no to work that would be an uncomfortable or potentially unethical stretch.

Imposter ethics, job seeking, and expertise

Overcoming imposter syndrome regarding a job you already have can often be fixed by reminding yourself of what a good job you are doing, assuming that is the case. Depending on the circumstances you may be able to turn to colleagues, or even your boss, for some extra reassurance. 

Unfortunately, there are too many bosses out there who don't give their employees enough praise when things go well, or mishandle situations where things do not go well (blaming the wrong people, for example, or if circumstances were to blame, failing to adequately explain that). 

Prompting or allowing employees to feel they have under-performed when that is not the case is not the fault of employees, it is bad management. Insufficient praise and reassurance can lead some employees to develop imposter syndrome. And imposter syndrome that is not addressed can undermine an employee's performance and job satisfaction, not to mention their sense of self-worth.

Imposter syndrome can be particularly problematic when you are looking for a job. This is one area where I think the difference between male and female social conditioning can be seen. In my experience, women are less likely to apply for a job if are not 100% sure they can do it. Men are more likely to take a chance.*

I can illustrate this from my own experience after I got laid off from a comfortable job at a bank at the recession of 1980 (Iran and Volcker Recession: January 1980–July 1980).

Fortunately, while performing those roles I had kept track of my performance and was able to cite imporessive—and accurate—metrics in my resumé and cover letters. Yes, I had a bachelor's degree in English and religious studies, and part of a master's degree in philosophy of religion, and I did mention them, but there were not many employers looking for someone with degrees like that in America's Upper Midwest during  

What to do? There was a mortgage and car loan to pay. I desperately needed a job earning decent money. So I replied to just about every job ad that offered more than minimum wage. I got very few responses, none of them positive. At one point I applied to be a sheriff's deputy, but that didn't get very far because the local sheriff's department was under the mistaken assumption that they couldn't hire me because I was a foreigner, even though I had a green card.

That's when I applied for an opening titled Chief Oil & Gas Tax Auditor for the State of North Dakota. The job listing said the role would include developing a computerized system for reporting and auditing petroleum production taxes. At that point in time I knew nothing about auditing or petroleum production, and very little about computers. Was I crazy to apply? Would it be unethical to accept? Did I mention I desperately needed a job?

Well, it turned out that the state tax commissioner's special assistant who had been appointed to tackle to the sudden surge of oil and gas production in the state was a Rhodes scholar and thus familiar with the English education system. (He was probably the first person I'd met in America who knew the value of a "First" degree from an English university since I moved there in 1976.)

When he saw my resumé, I was called in for an interview. This boiled down to one question: "If I send you off to a one week Petroleum Accounting course in Houston and then to the Texas Comptroller's school for petroleum tax auditing for two weeks, are you capable of bringing back everything they teach you and working with this other new hire, a former bank computer salesman, to set up an oil and gas production tax auditing system?

My answer was "Yes" and that was not an unethical answer. I had made no false claims about my knowledge and experience. I honestly believed that I could do what was asked of me. The tax commissioner's special assistant apparently concurred. I got the job. And it very went well. 

I suppose you could argue that I impersonated a qualified candidate for that position. I did not, at the time I applied, know how to do the job. But as luck would have it, the state could not afford to hire a formally qualified candidate, due to a set of circumstances of which I knew nothing at the time. (It had to do with something called the 1980 Crude Oil Windfall Profit Tax Act.)

What to do...

It's not pleasant to feel that you don't deserve the job you've got, or that you are unworthy of the confidence others have in you. The first step to dealing with feelings like this is to acknowledge them and name them. If you are experiencing persistent self-doubt and consistently attribute success in what you do to luck or external factors rather than your own skills and hard work, you probably have imposter syndrome, which is characterized by an inability to internalize your achievements.

The second step is to realize that you are not alone in this. Research suggests that up to 70% of people experience imposter syndrome at some point in their careers. That should ease you into the third step: talking to others about this. These days, a lot of people have heard of imposter syndrome and many have experienced it. Here are some more things you can do to get past it: 

1. Document your achievements by keeping a record of positive feedback and accomplishments.
2. Consider displaying visual reminders of your successes in both your workplace and home.
3. Take time to change your inner dialogue. For example, try replacing "I don't know enough" with "I'm learning and growing."
4. Seek feedback. Ask those you work with if your work is really as good as people say it is. This can sound like 'fishing for compliments' so be open about what you're doing. Maybe something like: "Bill, was my work on that project as helpful as everyone said. I'm not fishing for compliments here, it's more of a sanity check."
5. Connect with mentors. Talking to others who've faced similar challenges can be very helpful.

Notes:

Not surprisingly, a lot of research around imposter syndrome has come from the fields of medicine and doctoring. This 2019 article is a good place to get more information and references.

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Privacy for Business

Privacy for Business

  May 13, 2015    Stephen Cobb

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I published "Privacy for Business: Web sites and email" in 2002. Much of the content about privacy principles in business is still relevant. You can download the book free of charge in electronic form as long as you respect the copyright and license agreement.

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5. The rights granted under, and the subject matter referenced, in this License were drafted utilizing the terminology of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (as amended on September 28, 1979), the Rome Convention of 1961, the WIPO Copyright Treaty of 1996, the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty of 1996 and the Universal Copyright Convention (as revised on July 24, 1971). These rights and subject matter take effect in the relevant jurisdiction in which the License terms are sought to be enforced according to the corresponding provisions of the implementation of those treaty provisions in the applicable national law. If the standard suite of rights granted under applicable copyright law includes additional rights not granted under this License, such additional rights are deemed to be included in the License; this License is not intended to restrict the license of any rights under applicable law.

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How to fix your Google Chrome bookmarks if you can't stand the new "enhanced design"

How to fix your Google Chrome bookmarks if you can't stand the new "enhanced design"

  April 26, 2015    Stephen Cobb

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Has Google messed up your Chrome bookmarks with its "new, improved" bookmark system? Don't panic! You can fix it and go back to the way things were, where your bookmarks are organized the way YOU want.

The obscure but simple fix is described below (this works as of April 27, 2015). If you want to know more about the "Enhanced Bookmark" changes that Google has been forcing onto users, scroll down below these steps or click here.

(Note: I am certainly not the first person to describe this fix. That's because Google has been rolling out the new "enhanced" bookmark to Chrome users over time, for several months. Indeed, you might not have seen the new bookmark interface yet, but now you know what the fuss is about.)

Steps to return your Chrome bookmarks to the normal folder arrangement

1. Go to chrome://flags > by typing chrome://flags in the URL bar and tapping Enter. You should see something like this, with one of the worst warning messages you will ever read in any software ever (don't those self-important "user interface enhancement" nerds at Google realize browsers are no joking matter!):



2. Find the "enhanced bookmarks" setting by using Find (Control/Command + F) and typing enhanced bookmark as seen here (the auto-fill will find it as you type):



3. Use the blue drop down box control to Change the setting to Disabled, as seen above.

Note: You should not make changes to any other settings on this page unless you are sure of what the effects will be. That part of the warning is appropriate.

4. Make sure there is no unsaved work in any of the pages you have open in Chrome and then click the Relaunch button at the bottom of the page:



That should make sure your Chrome bookmarks look the way they always have, so when you look at a bookmark it looks like this:



If you haven't yet seen the new "enhanced" Google Chrome bookmark it looks like this:



Now you know how to make it go away, I will explain why I think this new system is bad, and why forcing it onto Chrome users was a really dumb move by Google, not to mention arrogant.

What the flip did Google do to my bookmarks in Chrome?

Apart from gobbling up screen real estate, the new user interface for bookmarks in Chrome severely limits your organizational options. For example, it appears to offer no way to choose the folder for the bookmark other than the choices it suggests.

For example, there is a very specific folder on my system for pages related to something called HIMSS, but that folder does not appear as a choice, and I can't get to it from this box.

Google says I have to put the bookmark in the Bookmarks Bar or the Sysadmin folder (seriously, WTF has Sysadmin got to do with HIMSS).

But Stephen, what about the "VIEW ALL BOOKMARKED ITEMS" option, you ask. Oh no, you don't want to go there, because "there" is where you see just how badly Google has messed up your carefully curated bookmarks, about 15 years' worth of bookmarks in my case, maybe even more for you.

I mean there I was, cheerfully bookmarking pages in Chrome, gathering material for a research project in the third module of my Criminology degree course, saving the pages in: Mobile Bookmarks > MSc > Module 3. Then boom! Some arrogant, "I understand users better than you" expert at Google, says "Stephen, your system sucks, try this!" And here is a glimpse of what you see when you view all bookmarks in the new in-your-face interface:



Believe me when I tell you that no amount of scrolling down the list on the left takes me to "Mobile Bookmarks > MSc > Module 3". That structure is just not there. And I will add more thoughts about that on this page when I have calmed down. For now, I want to put this "fix" out there. If you want to come back for more, please bookmark this page (he said with no trace of irony at all, honest).

 

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Taxes, Lady Godiva, Coventry, privacy, and the first Peeping Tom

Taxes, Lady Godiva, Coventry, privacy, and the first Peeping Tom

  April 19, 2015    Stephen Cobb

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Naked Woman on Horseback might sound like a porn video but it's also a timely topic for the month of April, the month when taxes are front of mind for many Americans: personal income taxes for the previous calendar year must be paid on or before the 15th of the month.

For me, the topic of paying taxes conjures up many images, some more pleasant than others. The oldest of these images is indeed a woman on a white horse: the celebrated tax protester, Lady Godiva, for which my home town of Coventry in England is famous.

(Or rather, Coventry should be famous for Lady Godiva, but I suspect that many Americans eat delicious Godiva Chocolate in complete ignorance of the story behind the logo of the naked lady on the horse, for she truly has no historical connection with chocolate - the confection did not even exist when she made her famous ride.)

Lady Godiva was the wife of the Earl of Leofric, ruler of the central region of England, known as Mercia, in the early years of the eleventh century. Leofric was one of the most powerful Earls in the country prior to the Norman invasion of 1066 (Leofric died in 1057). Historical records show that both Leofric and his wife were great benefactors, donating land and money to establish monasteries as well as jewelry for shrines, even gold-fringed vestments for St. Paul's cathedral in London.

Unfortunately, the power struggles that beset England in those times consumed resources that included taxes levied on the Earls' subjects. These were not predictable annual levies. Times of conflict would produce successive tolls to fund armies, at least until the posturing or fighting was over. When Lady Godiva implored her husband not to impose more taxes he is said to have declared something to this effect: "The day I stop raising taxes is the day you ride naked through the city." So that is what she did.

If you're looking for a really bad pun you could say something about calling his bluff in the buff, but the good folk of Coventry took this act of courage very seriously. At Lady Godiva's request they all went inside at the appointed hour and shuttered their windows; all except one, whose name was Tom.

As Lady Godiva rode by on her white horse, long blonde hair draped across her body, Tom peeped out. Legend has it that Tom, the original Peeping Tom, was struck blind by God for his voyeurism. On the bright side, Leofric kept his word and "abolished the onerous taxes."

This story is commemorated every day in the center of Coventry where, every hour, on the hour, a clock displays the figure of Lady Godiva riding by, while from above leers the despicable Peeping Tom.

To be honest, the ride of Lady Godiva is more legend than documented historical fact, although the lady herself was very definitely a real person. She outlived her husband and and at the time of her death still maintained a large estate, as recorded in the Domesday Book. By the time I was born, and this was several centuries after Lady Godiva's "allegendary" ride, the city of Coventry had a well-established tradition of re-enacting the event, by which I mean a woman would ride a horse in a large procession through the city. The citizenry did not go inside, instead they came out to watch. The woman was not always naked and nobody was blinded.

The Godiva procession has been revived in recent years and the city of Coventry has done more to tell the world about its most famous lady. Less attention is paid to Peeping Tom, but he has become synonymous with voyeur throughout the English-speaking world, even as the digital revolution has expanded the potential for voyeurism and invasion of privacy. The digital equivalent of blinding those who look where they shouldn't has not yet been invented, but this age is yet young.

p.s. I have no idea why Godiva Chocolate chose Lady Godiva as a logo, but I do give them credit for the Lady Godiva program it started in 2012 "to celebrate inspirational women around the world." The program seeks to support "extraordinary women who embody the spirit of Lady Godiva through their attributes of selflessness, generosity and leadership." Amen to that!

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Complacency is the curse of comfort

Complacency is the curse of comfort

  April 18, 2015    Stephen Cobb

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A writer once wrote: Complacency is the curse of comfort. I think what he means is that a comfortable life can lead us to become complacent about the world's problems, which can then turn up on our doorstep to discomfit us. Actually, I know that is what the writer meant, because I am that writer.

Back in the 1970s, when I was a long-haired student of the arts, my favorite writers, other than Shakespeare, were Montaigne, Bacon, and Blake. I liked Michel de Montaigne because he put so much of himself into his writing and pioneered literary non-fiction centuries long before it was called that. I liked Francis Bacon because he claimed the entire world as his subject matter. And I liked William Blake because he invented graphic self-publishing, held picnics in the nude, and wrote some wicked proverbs, like: "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."

I was fascinated by these proverbs and the way we humans will quote memorable sayings for centuries after the sayer has died. As a student I remember thinking that it would be cool to say something that memorable. I had been scribbling poems since I was eight and by eighteen I was writing everything from free form verse to sonnets (the latter were usually written to girlfriends, and I mean hand-written and hand delivered, so unless some old flames out there have kept them, they have not survived). 

One day, while I was still a teenager, it occurred to me to write a saying or proverb. I looked around at my world of white privilege and felt how seductive it was to relax back into the comfortable life that was all around me; and then I saw my parents go out in the evenings, often after a hard day of work, and try to raise money for worthy causes, try to raise awareness of injustices that afflicted others, often on the other side of the world. I realized that there was more to being alive than being comfortable. That's when I came up with: "Complacency is the curse of comfort."

Of course, I then had to figure out how to spread my proverb around the world. I carried on writing poetry but my efforts to get published went nowhere. I thought about being a playwright but that seemed even less likely to get me published than being a poet. I did plot a number of novels and I figured that I would put my wise words into the mouth of one of my characters. (All of this was before self-publishing and digital publishing became a big deal, and although Blake was a brilliant poet and artist, his publishing business was not a big money maker.)

Eventually, my career in computers and security took up all of my writing energy. In a period of seven years I wrote more than twenty big thick computer texts. They accumulated sales of more than one million books, but they were all what you might call non-literary non-fiction.

When blogging came along I saw a chance to "publish" a few things that were more creative, like the story of the little redback spider and the truth about what Willie Sutton said. And now of course, I have published my proverb. One of the many benefits of the Internet is that it simplifies laying claim to words. I have Googled "Complacency is the curse of comfort" numerous times and it does appear that I am the person who said this.

I am also the person who said: "The best weapon with which to protect information is information." True enough, but hardly a universally useful saying. So I need to work on more inspired aphorisms, like Blake's:

• The most sublime act is to set another before you.
• The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
• The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way.

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Crossing the North Atlantic: 1 plane, 3 ships, and a guitarist

Crossing the North Atlantic: 1 plane, 3 ships, and a guitarist

  December 06, 2014    Stephen Cobb

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I came to America on a ship. That statement, which is true, can be useful in conversations. For example, when I want to emphasize my age. At that point in the conversation the fact that I came to America from somewhere else is usually apparent from the remnants of my English accent.

Proper-plane: Britannia

However, the truth is that my first visit to America was by car, from Canada, when I was six. And I got to Canada not on a ship but in a plane, one that had propellers on it, just like this:

That's a Bristol Britannia, which first flew a few months before I was born. The plane entered service in 1957 and my family flew on one from England to Canada in 1959. The Bristol company has a storied history dating from 1910 until the present. The flight was wonderful. I got to sit with the pilot for a while and received an enameled pair of B.O.A.C. wings.

Proper Ship: Saxonia

For about a year my family lived in Renfrew, Ontario. I attended Queen Elizabeth Public School. When we returned from Canada to England a year later, we traveled on the Cunard liner you see below, RMS Saxonia, built in Scotland in 1957:

Despite a rough late autumn crossing from Quebec City to Southampton, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. We were not in first class, but we had an assigned steward at our table in the dining room and he was terrific. For some meals I was the only one at the table (did I mention it was a rough crossing - my mother lost 14 pounds in 5 days). At the end of the trip the steward gave me a certificate he had drawn, stating that I not been seasick the entire trip. Little did I know that the Saxonia would reappear in my life many years later.

MS Mikhail Lermontov

Back in England, I attended King Henry VIII School for Boys and then went to university in Leeds where my first year roommate was guitarist Steve Donnelly. During the final year of my Bachelors degree I applied for and received a post-graduate teaching post at McMaster University, in Ontario, Canada. To get there I booked passage on a Russian ocean liner, the MS Mikhail Lermontov:

In the mid-1970s the Lermentov was making round trip cruises from New York, via London, to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in Russia. Traveling at a leisurely pace, the ship was a floating showcase of Soviet culture, and a way to obtain U.S. dollars from the mainly American passengers who took the round trip.

I have no doubt that my "student" fare of 100 Pounds Sterling for passage from London to New York - cheaper than airfare and a real bargain when you consider it included as much luggage as you wanted - was a ploy to expose young people to the wonders of the Soviet Union. These included some terrific Russian cuisine, Russian dance performances and all sorts of classes (balalaika, borscht, Russian literature and of course, the poetry of Mikhail Lermontov himself).

However, the most memorable cultural experience for me was passing under New York's Verrazano-Narrows Bridge at dawn and sailing past the Statute of Liberty as the sun came up. After that, the trip by Greyhound bus from New York to Hamilton, Ontario, was a bit of an anti-climax.

TS/S Stefan Batory

After graduate school in Canada I went back to England, choosing an ocean passage again, from Montreal to Southampton on a Polish ocean liner, the TS/S Stefan Batory that was originally built in the Netherlands in 1952:

The Polish crew were great and the service was wonderful. In fact, the Batory went on crossing the ocean from Gydnia to Montreal until 1988, the last regularly scheduled transatlantic passenger service.

Note: TS/S stands for Turbine Steam Ship. MS in a ship's name stands for Motor Ship, indicating that it is propelled by an internal combustion engine. These abbreviations are a great source of trivia questions, like what does the RM in RMS stand for? It's not Royal Majesty, but Royal Mail.

The Steve Donnelly Connection

Some 29 years after my last transatlantic crossing by ship I met up with my former college roommate whom I had not see in more than 30 years. To cut a long story short, and leave out the many expressions of wonder, it turns out that after Leeds, Steve had played guitar in a house band on the Saxonia! So my roommate had sailed the seas in the 1970s on the same boat that took me from Canada to England as a boy.

And get this, the ship Steve played on was Soviet at the time! It turns out that in August 1973 the Saxonia was bought by the Soviet Union-based Black Sea Shipping Company. She was renamed after Leonid Sobinov, a famous Russian tenor, and put to cruising!

Not only that - and this is where it gets really spooky - as the conversation continued, we realized that Steve had played in another ship band, on another Soviet vessel: the Lermontov! Apparently, she had been upgraded to a Western-style cruising ship in 1982.

A few years ago, I was at a wedding reception in Toronto and late in the evening the bride's father, a gracious host and serious follower of rock music, asked me: "What's the biggest coincidence you've ever experienced?" I had to tell him the one about the two ships and the rock band roommate.

The epilogue is a sad but telling one:  In 1986, in an incident that prefigured the tragic fate of the Costa Concordia, the Lermentov hit rocks while sailing close to shore and sank. That was in New Zealand waters. Steve was not onboard. In fact, all aboard were saved, except for one crew member. She now rests on the ocean floor and is considered one of the world's finest wreck diving experiences.

Epi-epilogue

Let me end this strange tale of ocean travels with Steve on guitar...he's the serious looking one on the right.

You will also find Steve on all Nick Lowe albums since Dig My Mood, and on Suzanne Vega's Nine Objects of Desire plus Sheryl Crow's eponymous album. Fans of Bill Nighy may know Steve from the 1999 movie Still Crazy, for which Steve provided most of the music and guitar solos. More recently Steve appeared on Bonnie Raitt's first studio album in seven years: Slipstream. Finally, check for the iconic Fender coming in at 1:48 in the following, that's Steve Donnelly:

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Of Spiders and Sin

Of Spiders and Sin

  November 03, 2014    Stephen Cobb

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What follows is the definitive telling of my story about the Australian redback spider and its pedagogical employment in a theological context. This is a tale I have told many times in the company of friends but it has never been recorded for posterity, until now. I have included some notes below the story that might be of interest and will add more later as they occur to me.

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The phrase ‘liberal Baptist church’ might sound like an oxymoron, but I grew up in Coventry, England, and the theology of some English Baptists is quite liberal. Indeed, I was raised by a congregation of souls so liberal that I became a Sunday school teacher even though I had never been baptized and had not yet – nor have I since – accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. Back then, as the sixties were turning into the seventies, Sunday school was more about the geography of poverty, feeding the hungry, and boycotting companies that did business with the white regime in South Africa.

The person who leads the services in an English Baptist church is referred to as the minister, although said person might be addressed as Reverend. From time to time, our regular Reverend went on holiday and Sunday services were conducted by guest ministers, which is how I first encountered the redback spider.

The guest minister that Sunday was from the continent that is the home of said spider, Australia. The deacons who arranged his visit were apparently unaware that some Australian Baptists were much closer in spirit to their evangelical cousins in the southern states of America, and their manner of sermonizing more that of preacher than minister. Such was the case with this unfortunate fellow, as his address to our Sunday school children would reveal, quite painfully as it turned out.

“Good morning children,” this preacher began, “I come from Australia, a place some people call ‘the land down under,’ and in that land we have some amazing creatures.”

His unfamiliar accent, and his dramatic emphasis on the last two words, definitely got the attention of his young audience, which ranged from about four to fourteen. The preacher continued, “One creature, the redback spider, is no bigger than the nail of my little finger, but his bite is deadly.”

To my English ears, this last word, which should have carried a lot of weight, sounded like ‘diddly’ which may explain how this children’s sermon went astray.

He continued, “Although he is so small, just one bite from this little fellah can kill you … dramatic pause … dead.”

Again, the ‘dead’ sounded like ‘did’ to me but the preacher’s delivery left no doubt that death was what this small but fearsome creature delivered. One bite could end your life. I could see some of the younger children sitting up a little straighter, eager for whatever came next.

“Now then children, what does this remind us of?”

The preacher paused for an answer. Scanned the young faces. Nothing.

“Just one bite and you’re dead. What does this remind us of?”

More silence.

“Sin!” he proclaimed, apparently failing to detect in the faces before him the signs of confusion that this word caused.

The preacher took a deep breath and forged ahead, asking a question he assumed would solve the riddle: “How many sins does it take to keep you out of heaven?”

More silence with just a hint of embarrassed shuffling from the adults in the congregation. The preacher was undeterred.

“Come on children,” he continued, as though this was the first thing you learned in Sunday school, “How many sins does it take to keep you out of heaven? Is it two? Five? Ten? A hundred?”

The sequence of numbers was enunciated with what sounded to me like a mild but mounting sense of despair. It was at this point that young Mark Jacobs from my class shot up his hand. No more than seven years old, Mark was a bit of a handful, but very quick on the uptake. I could tell he was sure he had this one figured out.

“Yes!” exclaimed the preacher, extending his palms towards Mark, who loudly delivered his answer, a logical deduction from the clues provided, but also – I like to think – a reflection of the spirit of the church in which he was being raised:

“Infinity!”

My heart went out to the preacher as he stood there and said about all he could say at that point: “No. It’s one. Just one sin can keep you out of heaven. Now let us sing hymn number 127: “All Things Bright and Beautiful."

Notes:

1. The chorus of that hymn, written by Cecil Francis Alexander in 1848, goes like this:

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful:
The Lord God made them all.

I have no idea if Alexander had the redback spider in mind when she penned line two.

2. Very few renditions of this hymn today include the third verse of the original, which goes like this:

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.

In fact, several members of our congregation refused to sing the hymn at all, owing to the fact that its author held views so opposed to their own.

3. The English Baptists believe in adult baptism, a belief I greatly respect because it holds that nobody should take this step in life unless they make an informed decision to do so. I was never pressured to make this choice, again something I greatly respect. I remain unbaptized, but always welcome at that church.

4. Many years later I encountered redback spiders in Alice Springs, Australia. They were pointed out by the very gifted engineer who worked on my wife's off-road racing vehicle, in a dark corner of his garage. He had recently been bitten by one, causing a very nasty injury, but fortunately he survived.

5. My wife was living in Alice Springs at the time because she was in charge of network security at a place called JDFPG for Joint Defense Facility Pine Gap, which is probably one of the largest computing facilities in the Southern Hemisphere.

6. JDFPG has a rugby team called the Redbacks with an awesome emblem. I know because one of their shirts is a prized possession of mine.

7. Theologically speaking one can argue that both Mark and the preacher were correct. Hard line protestant thinking on sins is that just one is enough to keep you out of heaven -- and thus send you to hell when you die -- unless you accept Jesus Christ as your savior and are baptized, in which case your sins are washed away. Technically, if you committed an infinite number of sins, you could still get into heaven because God's forgiveness is infinite.

 

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