jennings rampage

An open letter to Sammy Sosa

Dear Mr. Sosa,

I’m pretending to write to you today because I know how you feel, and I want to offer my support to you and your family in this difficult time. You see, I’ve also been accused of cheating when I actually wasn’t, and I know how difficult it can be to clear your name.

Now, I’m no Puerto Rican baseball superstar whose life and career is being dissected on basic cable as I write this, but back in college, I like to think I was a pretty big fish. Certainly, the student government at the University of Rochester was no national pastime, but it was a pastime, and at least it held the interest of the student newspaper. With baseball’s waning popularity over the past few years, perhaps the sizes of the proportions of the populations who follow baseball and follow student government are pretty similar. Or perhaps not. I’m going to go ahead and stop justifying my parallel.

I built a career in student government on one major accomplishment: the development of an online voting system for campus elections. It was little more than a few Perl scripts hiding behind a suex program running on the University’s primary UNIX mail server, but it was hot fucking shit in 1997, believe you me. It got its maiden cruise in the spring of 1998, and completely hit it out of the park. Voter turnout was way up, people were very impressed, the process was very smooth, and the stock of a young Senator Jennings was on the rise.

Throughout the next year, I continued to kick ass. Student appropriations, dining services, minority student affairs, Univeristy policy – I kept myself elbow-deep in all of it. Now, I never made any claim to being the most charismatic leader in the world, but I’ve always felt that I have a talent for listening to many opinions and making as many people as possible feel involved in any given process and selecting the best course of action in the end. I had my feet firmly planted in reality, despite my consistent claim to be the smartest man alive. People had confidence in me and liked my style, so I was a natural candidate for student body president in the spring of 1999.

Of course, being self-effacing is no fun unless you set yourself up for a big downfall, so I joked around about having the ability to control the outcome of elections held on “my” online voting system. It worked as a joke because it made sense; I was the project manager for its development, I’m good with computers, and I worked as a student staff member in the UNIX group that maintained that server. Still, it couldn’t possibly have been true, for no fewer than seventy obvious reasons, not the least of which being that no student had root access to anything at all, and no one would have let me get away with such a blatant conflict of interest in the first place. But still, it worked as a joke.

Everyone sees where this is going, right? Mr. Sosa? Outstanding.

So it comes time for the presidential election, and there’s a good field of seven or eight candidates. It was a primary/run-off style election, where if no candidate scored 50% of the vote in the primary, the top two finishers square off in a run-off election. The winner of the primary was a young woman named Ana Hubbard, whose name still makes ass twitch, with something like 380 votes. In second place, way WAY behind, was me, with 240 votes.

I’ll skip the inspirational story of hard work and perserverance, because back on planet Earth, I only managed to come back because every other major candidate in the race threw their support behind me. (I’ll never forget Chris Sabis bounding into the lounge where I was trying to take my mind off of my inevitable loss and walking right up to me, shaking my hand, and saying “congratulations, Mr. President.” That’s still probably my favorite memory of anything anywhere.)

So in a matter of a moment, one victory party was completely ruined and another was hastily assembled. At the ruined victory party, the whispering began immediately: “Jennings fixed that election.” At the unexpected victory party, the drunken boasts were too much to resist: “hey guys, you know, I fixed that election!”

The next day, I slept in, skipped all my classes (fuck academics, I’m the fucking president!), and took a few victory laps around campus to soak it all in. Mostly smiles and high-fives, but a few glares and shifted glances as well. It seems that while I was strutting around pretending that what I just accomplished actually mattered, Ana Hubbard was sitting in the Unix group’s office, trying to find out whether or not I stole the election. They reassured her as much as they could, explaining how I had absolutely no more access to the mail system than any other student and how unlikely it was that I had cracked in without being detected, but you can be sure that she didn’t buy it.

No one ever looked me in the eye and accused me of tampering with my own voting system, but there was a tiny minority who was convinced of it. My own friends believed me, I think, and it wasn’t like there was a huge dark cloud hanging over my presidency because of it, mostly because I was so awesome that it didn’t matter how I got the job, everyone was just relieved that Ana didn’t. Sabis even told me that if I told him thirty years from now that I actually had stolen that election, he still wouldn’t know whether or not I was on the level. He’s kidding, I’ll bet, but still, there’s truth hiding in there.

The worst part of it for me is that I’ll actually never know whether or not that election went down fairly. Sure, I didn’t tamper with it, but that doesn’t mean my friends on staff in the UNIX group didn’t. They tell me they didn’t, then they kid around about it, and I’m left not knowing what to think. On top of that, there was a little-publicized breach of security on the mail server the week before that election. All the voting stuff passed the audits, but still, seed analogies and all of that.

I’m not pretending to be an angel; I’ve cheated plenty of times in my life. I plagarized my final paper for History of Mathematics, I cheated at the state math tournament when I was in eighth grade, I know lust in my heart. But damnit all, I did not cheat in that election.

So Sammy, yes, I sort of know how you feel. Even once this starts to blow over, you’re going to be in your head for a long time at the plate, wondering if somehow the bat you’re holding was corked without you knowing it. You’re going to have to deal with your detractors, who you already had before this particular episode started, except now they have a little more fuel. Your supporters will be there, but maybe they’ll joke around about it in just a certain way that tells you that even they have their doubts. All I can tell you is this: just put it out of your mind and keep doing your job. Put the focus back on the field. Maybe work on your defense a little. You can’t control what other people are going to do or say or think, so just keep doing what you do. In the final analysis, the people who were pro-Sammy before this are going to by and large remain on your side, and the people who already hate you will just keep on being annoying bastards. Don’t let the bastards get you down, dude.

Unless you actually did intend to cheat, in which case, fuck you.

My best, and let’s go baseball,

Scott Jennings