Being Able To Guess The Ending Is Bad For Your Health

Tweet

I am very good at cracking the case prematurely in reading detective novels or watching Whodunits. A few, like The Usual Suspects, can throw a major surprise my way but I often see the twist way ahead of the big reveal being announced in the closing reel or pages. There used to be a TV series called Tales of The Unexpected, originally based on excellent and sometimes macabre stories by Roald Dahl but they later opened the series up to original screenplays as well. In most cases it should have been called Tales Of The If You Don’t Guess This Before The First Commercial Break You’re An Idiot. My big problem is that I often anticipate the ending in real life too. I have a habit of finishing people’s sentences, jokes and anecdotes for them, especially when they drag the story out so long it starts to sag in the middle fall apart like over-stretched chewing gum. Some employers once drew the staff aside to announce redundancies we all expected anyway, and tried to break it to us gently, with power-point presentations showing a big rock slowly sinking in the ocean, but within five minutes I was asking, “Is this about redundancies?” I was hushed and had to wait for them to run through the whole farce of telling us the official way. Being told gently that a pet, or even a relative was dead, I often just cut in with, “She’s dead, isn’t she?” It seems insensitive, but I would rather hear such news directly, and directly to the point. Some stories actually get more tedious when you know where they are going and still see the teller meandering around to stretch out the big revelation, and some people resent it when I cut to the chase for them, but I lack the patience to wait out the telling when it is dragged out for an eternity. I end up being arrogant and rude enough to cut in and strip all presence of suspense away. Sometimes I bite my tongue to stop myself, but I find I frequently fail. If they ever make it legal to kill just one person you dislike, quite a few people would come gunning for me. Hopefully, I’ll see them coming. Arthur Chappell