When I was in the Ordnance Officer Advanced Course at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, I had two habits that my fellow classmates noticed almost immediately after the first class started. Each little class measured student success using daily and weekly quizzes and tests. Those quizzes and tests led up to a class final test. During each of those quizzes and tests, the instructors told all of the students to put away all of their study materials and books and clear their desks of all materials except for a pen to write with. The instructors would allow the students to use pencils as well. As I mentioned, I had a couple of habits or eccentricities that my classmates noticed about me. The first was that I would look at a question, ostensibly, then I would gaze off into space and take my right hand and massage my right earlobe, after which I would again look at the paper and choose an answer or write an answer. The second habit or eccentricity I had was that at the beginning of each test or quiz I would reach into my pocket and pull out one Kennedy half-dollar coin piece. I would lay that Kennedy half-dollar coin piece in the upper left-hand corner of my desk with the head side facing up. So, if you are fortunate enough to have one of those Kennedy half-dollars in your possession and you so position it, head side up, you will notice that the president is facing to the left away from you. The very first time I did that in class during a test, another student in class called it to the instructor’s attention. The instructor came over and asked me about it. I told him that it was this little ritual that I had that went all the way back to when I was a kid and I told him he could take the coin and put it underneath a microscope to verify that there were no answers written on the coin. He assured me that would not be necessary. I insisted because I did not want other members of my class to think that good old JFK was helping me to cheat. He just told me to cut the shit and get on with the test. So, from that day forward, nobody challenged the presence of the coin. These habits or eccentricities didn’t just show up when I showed up at the advanced course. Oh, hell no. I did the same damn thing when I was in the Ordnance Officer Basic Course as well. I also did it in Officer Candidate School (OCS). However, in OCS, I had to be a helluva lot sneakier. Cuz let me tell you, those sonofabitch Teaching, Advising, and Counseling (TAC) officers would make you hit the wall and write you up for all kinds of little bullshit. I’m pretty damn sure that having a Kennedy half-dollar coin laying out in plain view could be construed as some sort of security violation. But it wasn’t too hard to fool those idiots. Cuz they weren’t exactly the sharpest tools in the shed or the brightest bulbs in the building if you catch my drift. I don’t remember exactly when I picked up those habits. They kinda just showed up one day. Then, there they were. It was like, one day they weren’t there and the next day, they were. One day, not there, the next day, there. Not there. There. I just don’t remember exactly when that paradigm shift occurred. The right hand rubbing the right earlobe thing, my mom told me I had been doing that ever since I was a baby. You know. Some kids sucked their thumb. I rubbed my ear lobe. Like that. And I’ve kinda been doing it ever since. Get over it. Anyway, to somebody who just now, today noticed something, there has to be a story or an explanation. So of course, to my classmates, there had to be an explanation. Naturally, since I was also knocking down maximum scores on every single quiz and every single test, that made it even more certain to my classmates that there had to be a story or an explanation behind my weird quirks. There wasn’t. But if you are like me and you have a weird quirk or two, and other people can link that weird quirk or two to something else significant like achieving the maximum score on every single test you take, then there will always be questions. You can never get away from it. So, when my fellow classmates asked me why I laid the Kennedy half-dollar on the desk in the upper left-hand corner with the head facing away from me, I always answered, “I do that because this is my good luck coin. I always get maximum scores with this lucky coin.” Suddenly, all of the cellar dwellers wanted to buy my lucky Kennedy half-dollar. At the time, I actually had two or three Kennedy half-dollars. But one of those was a 1964 Kennedy half-dollar, and it was made partially with silver. So, I wouldn’t think of selling it. However, I saw an opportunity to make some money. I went to the bank and asked if I could buy ten Kennedy half-dollars with a 1967 mint stamp. Well, as it turned out, the bank only had nine. So, I bought all nine. But I already had one with a 1967 mint stamp. When someone asked me if they could buy my lucky Kennedy half-dollar, I said that the price was five dollars. The guy moaned and bitched and complained. But I said, “Look pal, this here is my lucky coin. You’re asking me to give up my luck. I’m willing to do that but I gotta have something for my loss. I don’t think that five dollars is too much to ask. Do you?” I wasn’t really because that was all bullshit. But he didn’t know that. That argument worked like a champ. I sold every single one of those Kennedy half-dollars for five dollars a-piece. I paid exactly $.50 for each one of them. That was a nice tidy sum of beer money. Yeah. PT Barnum once said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” I just happened to have a whole bunch of them, suckers I mean, in my class. When my classmates asked me about the earlobe thing, I really had a wild story for them. I told them that I had a photographic memory, which was true. I did have a photographic memory of sorts. I could read a book and then later, I could pull those pages back up in my mind and visualize the writing on those pages to find the answer that I was looking for. When I was going through high school, my classmates never understood how I knew so many different topics of discussion without ever having opened any of the textbooks. The answer was simple. When I was a young kid in elementary school, I would go and sit in the library for hours after school in the winter reading every single reference book and encyclopedia that they had from cover to cover. I read them in the library because the librarian wouldn’t let me check them out. Later on, all I had to do was open up those books in my brain to the page I was looking for and start reading for the answer I was looking for. It worked like a charm. But back to the earlobe thing. I told my classmates that I had this photographic memory, and I used my earlobe as a switch to activate it. When I wanted to turn on that photographic memory to pull up an answer, I had to look off into space and rub my earlobe to activate the memory. If you believe that line of shit, I’ve got a big orange bridge for sale out on the West Coast. If you don’t like bridges, I also have a big Canyon down in Arizona for sale really cheap. In the final analysis, my weird habits or quirks or eccentricities did not for one second give me an edge. However, it is quite likely that my superb memory was the likely reason for my academic success. It is more likely than not that quirks or habits can be blamed for many exercises in futility.
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