477: Getting Away With It

This American Life

Society & Culture, News, Politics, Arts

4.6 • 88.8K Ratings

🗓️ 15 October 2023

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

People breaking the rules fully, completely, and with no bad consequences. Some justify this by saying they’re doing it for others, or for a greater good. Some really don’t care. And, unlike the mealy weaklings you usually hear on this program: none of these wrongdoers seem regretful about what they’ve done.

Ira takes a flight with travel writer Ken Hegan, to witness Ken deploying a travel gadget that keeps the seat in front of him from reclining. This means more knee space for Ken — but does he get away with it, really? (6 minutes)
Act One: A boy rides shotgun in a memorable car ride with his mother, and in the process learns how his father earns money for their family. This story appears in Domingo Martinez’s memoir, The Boy Kings of Texas, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. (17 min)
Act Two: We asked listeners to call in with their stories of getting away with it, and got nearly 1000 messages. Here are a handful. (6 minutes)
Act Three: Molly Shannon tells the story of when she and a friend evaded a whole lot of adults to travel half-way across the country, despite the fact that they were twelve years old and wearing tutus. Her story was recorded during a live taping of WTF with Marc Maron. (4 minutes)
Act Four: Producer Alex Blumberg tells the story of how Oklahoma, against huge odds, came to have the first and best publicly-funded pre-school system in the country, and how one businessman joined the fight because a cardboard box full of evidence convinced him that pre-school was the smartest business decision the state could make. (21 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	From WBEZ Chicago, it's this American life.
0:04.0	My name is Ken Hegan and I'm a travel writer.
0:08.0	How tall are you? I'm 6 foot 2.
0:10.0	So I'm going to fight to Minneapolis sitting next to Ken Hegan, 6 foot 2 travel writer.
0:15.0	And Ken is trying to pull off a scheme that is not at all friendly.
0:20.0	Though to his credit he feels bad about what he's doing.
0:23.0	So explain what just happened here.
0:27.0	Well, I can tell you, I've only had about four hours sleep,
0:35.0	chiefly because I was a little nervous about trying something new.
0:39.0	What I just did was I clamped these two pieces of plastic that look like the monsters from alien, like those alien heads.
0:51.0	And they're clamps. You basically slide these clamps onto your tray table
0:56.0	and it prevents the person in front of you from tilting back and slamming into your knees if you're a tall man like I am.
1:03.0	He read about these clamps on the internet and thought that is simultaneously the most inventive and the most passive aggressive gadget he'd ever heard of.
1:10.0	It's called the need defender.
1:12.0	And as a tall guy who flies two or three times a month through his job, he decided he had to try them.
1:18.0	Attaching the clamps to the arms of his tray table was simple, but next came the part that Ken can awake the night before.
1:26.0	The makers of need defender have something called a courtesy card that you're supposed to then hand to the person in front of you to let them know you're deploying the need defender clamps.
1:38.0	So I, I just tapped the woman's shoulder in front of me, said this message is for you.
1:47.0	The card says, this is a need defender courtesy card, TM trademark.
1:52.0	I am using need defender TM. Need defender TM is a small plastic device that helps me protect myself by limiting how much the seat in front of me can recline.
2:02.0	I wanted to let you know about this.
2:04.0	And then underneath Ken checked the box that said that her seat would be able to recline two inches.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from This American Life, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of This American Life and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.