How to Teach an Alien to Make a Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich

Today, I can’t hear out of my right ear.

Two weeks ago I had surgery to remove two bones in my middle ear and replace them with a prosthesis. I also gained  a new ear drum. If I heal as planned, I hope to join the 80% of people who undergo this procedure and gain significant hearing ability—as much as say, uncovering your ears from your hands. I will know the results in three months.

My brilliant and highly regarded surgeon¹ (Hey, I did my research) used cartilage and skin from inside my tragus—the area of the ear that sits in front of the opening to the ear—to rebuild areas of my ear demolished (my word) for access through the canal and to build my new eardrum. It’s a brilliant tactic: no visible scars.

After the operation, my doctor instructed me to not get water in my ear. My post-surgical written instructions indicated that water into the ear might cause the surgery to be unsuccessful. Ergo—I’d have to have another surgery.

And who wants that? My surgery wasn’t horrible, but there’s a reason they send you home with a bag of narcotics.

“Just use a cotton ball and Vaseline®,” my doctor said with a shrug. “It’s easy and cheap.”

Her shrug made it seem so simple.

I really like my surgeon. I think she’s brilliant and I’m lucky.

And let’s keep in mind I might be a literalist. I once called my mother-in-law to ask her thoughts about how long I should shake my baby’s formula since the directions were to Shake very, very well.

Not Shake Before Using.

Not Shake Well Before Using.

Not even Shake Very Well Before Using, but Shake Very, Very Well Before Using.

This is serious stuff. Somewhere, experts in charge of creating nourishment for humans, baby ones, concluded that this food needed to be shaken well beyond the norms of any food in modern society.

I felt it worthy of a discussion for I fed my baby several times a day, and daily at that. 

I wouldn’t risk my baby’s health for whatever the consequences of shaking the formula only well would bring.

To this day, 30 years later, mention this story and my mother-in-law goes into a full-on, can’t-catch-her-breath, hold-her-gut hysteria. “Oh, C’mon!” I say. “I was worried about your grandson!”

And in my defense, why couldn’t they just write Shake for Three Minutes (or five, or nine or whatever very, very well means. We still don’t know) and save this young mother confusion?

But, I digress.

Just for fun, if your doctor gave you these instructions, how would you go about using the cotton and Vaseline®?

I turned to the best resource available in the wee hours of the morning: YouTube.

First, there aren’t many videos on making an ear plug. For reasons unknown to me, people would rather watch videos like Charlie Bit My Finger (900 million views) or Cat Wearing a Shark Costume Cleans the Kitchen on a Roomba  (13 million views).

In the first video I found on making an ear plug with cotton and Vaseline®, a doctor in a white coat says to take a cotton ball and cover it in a tablespoon of Vaseline®. Thank goodness! A specific amount.  He didn’t just say the dreaded word “some“.

Further research implores the viewer to not put anything into the ear canal, which would have been my tactic with the cotton ball. When you want to plug a hole, you put the plug into the hole, right? No. Do not do this. Your instincts are wrong and now your confidence is less.

So, I took a cotton ball and saturated it with Vaseline®. I scooped up a heap of the goo with two fingers all the while making a mental note that I would need a lot more from the grocery store.  I massaged the cotton ball between my fingers and thumbs until the white and airy fluff suffocated in defeat to half its volume and tinged yellow. 

It was slimy.

I carefully placed it into my ear cup and for good measure, I scooped out more Vaseline® and covered the yellow mound, careful to seal the seam between it and my ear. No water shall penetrate!

It was gooey.

My ear glistened.

But, it worked. Well, I didn’t really know if it worked because when I removed it after my shower, it was still a slimy suffocated ball tinged yellow and because it was already saturated, I couldn’t tell if it absorbed water.

But I did this for several days. 

It didn’t feel like a “just do this” situation. It didn’t feel correct.

So I turned to YouTube again.

This time I found a young middle school-aged freckled boy with no white coat of credibility illustrating to tear the cotton ball in half, put it into the ear, and THEN cover it with Vaseline®.

And it too worked, but took much less time, Vaseline®, and therefore, sludge in my healing, sore ear. And I could check that no water penetrated because the cotton ball part inside my ear remained fluffy and dry when removed.

This led me to think about teaching a person to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Let me explain…

In college, our communications professor gave us broadcasting students the assignment to create a video teaching an alien how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.²

The lesson in a phrase: Curse of Knowledge.

Technically, Curse of Knowledge is a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, communicating with other individuals, unknowingly assumes that the others have the background to understand.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to not know what you didn’t know once, now that you know it.

So, most students might have a list of instructions like this:

1. Take a slice of bread.
2. Use a knife and spread peanut butter on it.
3. Then spread jelly on the other piece of bread.
4. Put the two slices together and eat it.

Only, the bread is in a wrapper (remove a slice of bread from its wrapper). A knife has a sharp end and a handle (you must indicate which part of the knife to use).

We need more instruction. Remember, we are teaching an alien.

• How do you get the peanut butter out of the jar? 
• And the lid must be removed. You must hold the jar with your left hand (if you’re right-handed) and then turn the lid counter clockwise until the lid is free. Don’t forget to set the lid aside.
• How much peanut butter should you use? 1 tablespoon? The entire jar?
• How far do you spread the peanut butter? To the sides? Down the sides? Keep it in the middle?
• How much jelly? Etc. Etc.
• Which sides of the sandwich should you put together?
• How is it eaten? With a fork and knife? With a spoon? With a crowbar? 
• and so on…

The point is to not make assumptions.

We all need a bit more information to make sure our endeavors, even if it’s just making a sandwich, are successful.

Especially for us literalists.

Cheers to excellent communication!

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1. Hat tip to Dr. Tsai and Kaiser Permanente for the best, most wonderful care.
2. This is a classic exercise in communication. Communicating such an easy task is much harder than you think. So much so, a Google search on this specific topic yields nearly 4 million results. This exercise is used in teaching subjects from computer programming to communication and is taught to all ages, from kindergarteners to university students.

(October 16, 2019)