Fact-Checker

Back when I was thinking of becoming a journalist I always thought it would be stressful to have to get all the facts right all the time, mostly because the entire public would be scrutinizing whether I had it all right or not. As an engineer I work in facts all day long, but when I'm on my own time and especially when I'm blogging I tend to place more emphasis on "feelings".

Yes, I do have feelings. Even though my Meyers-Briggs type says I'm an INTJ; I think my thinking-T becomes a feeling-F whenever there's no work to be done. Just like my introverted-I becomes an extroverted-E whenever I'm feeling very comfortable in my surroundings or with a particular group of people or when I'm giving a performance and I'm well rehearsed. It also changes when I've been socializing a lot or, conversely, spending a lot of time alone. In other words, these two characteristics, my T/F and my I/E are VERY circumstantial.

As a consequence my blog, though mostly factual, contains some statements that aren't so much facts as they are my feelings about the facts. For example, when I said I drove 800 miles a week to North Platte, that's not a fact. If you look at a map of Nebraska, North Platte is actually 285 miles away from Omaha, which makes it 570 miles round trip. But there were several times when I was taking Dale Carnegie that I had to make the round trip twice in one week which means I drove 1140 miles. So I kind of mentally averaged all of my trips over the twelve week period and kind of came up with 800. It wasn't even a conscious mental calculation, just a swag.

Another example is from my post about Baker's grocery store. I think (and I'm not checking to see) that I said there was something like 24 inches of space for my groceries. I don't know what I said and since I'm blogging it's not "fact-check time", it's feeling time. I only know that it felt like it was only a few inches and that's what matters most. But it is a fact that my stuff didn't fit. Probably only about 1/3 of it did.

So you know, most of it is true, but sometimes the facts take a backseat to my feelings. I'm no journalist but I think I'm probably as accurate as one and I don't even have fact-checkers.