Fuck them all

Had a "Negotiation Strategies" course today. There were some people I knew, and that was OK.

One interesting episode: we had a game where 3 teams of us were supposed to build a structure, Stonehenge.

The trainer had 4 sets of blocks that would assemble to form stonehenge (although 1 set of blocks was incomplete. They were all marked according to which set they belonged to. The "market" would release blocks, and representatives from the 3 teams (of whom I was one) would snatch them. We would deduct the "cost" of these blocks from the accounts. Round by round, we would try to engage in barter or trade to get a complete set of blocks. If we managed to build stonehenge, the financial reward would be huge. The team with the highest amount of money at the end of the game would win.

Initially, all the 3 teams were mutually suspicious of each other. We would hide the markings on the blocks from each other so that nobody would ever know how many of each our teams had. It was a competitive game. But the majority of our blocks had the label "C" so we more or less figured out that we were going to build the stonehenge based on that set.

I think the people from Marketing were the first to realise that nothing could be accomplished unless we all co-operated to some extent that we tried to make sure that everybody would build 1 complete set each. To that end, we started trading info on what our total inventory was. And then our team realised that "C" was the incomplete set.

So we realised that if there was going to be a barter, we would all end up with complete stonehenges, but we would be the least well off, because we would have to pay the other teams to get more blocks. Furthermore we also had an incompetent grabber (ie me) who probably grabbed the fewest blocks among the teams. (Among 99 blocks, I grabbed, say, 31.) Which means we paid the least, which means, if no trading was done at all, we would win the game. Last of all, since it is extremely unlikely that this isn't the case (you do the maths if you know probability), all of the teams had blocks from each of the 4 sets.

In other words, we could just sit down and refuse to trade, say "fuck them all", and we would sabotage everybody's efforts, and since we had started out by paying the least money for the blocks we would be ahead of everybody. And almost independently of each other, that is what we all decided to do.

The other teams were shocked, of course, and dismayed. I don't know if they wanted to persuade us otherwise, but they didn't try that hard. It's almost they were admitting they would have done the same in our situation. We did try to sell the remaining bricks to 1 other team at an exorbitant price but later we recalculated that we charged too high: they would never have bought it, even when you factor in the windfall that comes from completing a set.

I had to laugh. I didn't believe we were doing this. The best British comedies are of horrid, despicable xiao3 ren2 who do petty things like this to each other. And now we were like the xiao3 ren2. The people who throw orange juice out of our kitchen windows knowing full well that other peoples' laundry are downstairs. The people who urinate in lifts. The Indonesians who pull the sand embargo shit on us.

We should have called this activity "stonewall" instead.

Anyway there was more interesting stuff to follow. Later on we had to construct a scenario where people would have to put their negotiation strategies into practice. I wrote on a piece of paper: you South Korea, we Taliban.

The instructor was sufficiently amused that he asked us to go first. It was a riot. I remember making comments like, "you have to decide whether you're going to pay up or not. While we have to decide whether we're going to hang or shoot the next hostage. Life is full of unpleasant decisions", and when one of the opposite team made the unfortunate statement "what would the world community think of you?", we said, "look, we're terrorists. Do we look like we give a damn? If we're such bleeding hearts we'd end up like those suckers we got locked up in the basement."

Or "look, we're really busy people. We don't have all day. We still have plenty of terrorist activities to plan, insurrection operations, Koran study sessions, drug smuggling operations, physical training sessions, prosthetic limb maintenance. We're not lazy people just because we happen to be Muslim."

Or "OK OK, maybe we won't execute tomorrow. We're just going to circumcise all the men."

And this comment that my brain thought of, but also censored. "Rest assured that we are not going to violate your women. Not when they are alive anyway."