Somewhere in the Bay Area there’s a man who was tried and convicted of being a terrible husband for the crime of eating a brisket sandwich. Stay with me.
At a recent San Francisco Giants game, the broadcast camera found a young mom named Erika making her way back to her seat. Baby strapped to her chest. Arms stacked with sandwiches and loaded fries. Beside her, her husband Ramses sat down and started eating.
The camera lingered, and the announcers did what announcers do. They filled the silence, and you can listen in here. They crowned Erika “mom of the year,” joked that Ramses was kicking back while she did all the heavy lifting, and invented a little exchange where he asks for ketchup and she daydreams about smacking him. Harmless booth banter. A few seconds of filler between pitches.
Then the clip escaped the ballpark.
Millions watched. Commenters called Ramses a deadbeat. Strangers told Erika she deserved better and should leave him. People who had never met this couple explained, with total confidence, exactly what their marriage looked like. A few went much further. They tracked down the family’s names and phone numbers, and some sent Ramses messages telling him to kill himself.
All from a clip shorter than the time it takes to microwave popcorn.
Here’s what the camera missed.
During the fifth inning, according to Erika’s Substack post, she stepped away to change their daughter’s diaper. Ramses offered to take the baby. She wanted to keep her close. While she was gone, she texted him a photo of the menu and offered to grab food. He told her to get whatever had the shortest line. When she came back, he moved her jacket to make room, greeted their daughter and asked if she wanted to eat first. She told him to go ahead. She’d eaten before the game and knew he hadn’t had a real meal all day. He offered to take the food off her lap. She said no, she was comfortable and didn’t want it anywhere near that sticky stadium floor. He offered to feed her. He offered to share his sandwich. She told him to enjoy it.
So he ate. Exactly as his wife asked him to.
And then there was the part no lens on earth could capture. Ramses had recently lost one of his oldest friends, a gifted ballplayer he’d known since they were kids. There was no funeral. No memorial. Nowhere to put the grief. Erika suggested the game might give him a way to remember his friend, and all night long Ramses was texting a group chat of people mourning the same loss.
When Erika finally told their side of the story, she wrote that the camera captured what was in her hands, but “it couldn’t show what he was carrying that night.”
That line should be printed on the inside of every conference room door in America.
Because here’s the uncomfortable truth. We don’t need a broadcast booth to do what those announcers did. We each come equipped with one. It lives right between our ears, and it is narrating the people around us all day long.
Your brain hates a blank space the way a toddler hates nap time. When it doesn’t have the facts, it doesn’t wait politely for them to arrive. It writes the script, casts the characters and hands out the villain role before intermission. It does this fast, it does it automatically, and it does it with breathtaking confidence. The story feels like knowledge. It isn’t. It’s a guess wearing a very convincing costume.
Think about how often this plays out at work.
A team member has kept her camera off for three straight meetings and answered your last two messages with a single word. The narrator in your head has already filed the report. Disengaged. Checked out. Probably updating her LinkedIn. What you can’t see is the 2 a.m. phone call from her mother’s assisted living facility, or the fact that she’s been running on four hours of sleep for a month and is spending every ounce of energy she has just showing up.
A new hire doesn’t say a word in the brainstorming session, and somebody quietly labels him “not a team player.” Meanwhile he came from a culture where you don’t speak until the senior people are finished, and he’s sitting on the best idea in the room, waiting for an invitation that never comes.
Salespeople, you know this game better than anyone. The buyer who walks in wearing flip-flops gets the B-team treatment. The quiet one in the back of the meeting gets ignored because the loud one must be the decision maker. The prospect who pushes back on price gets labeled cheap, when what she’s actually carrying is a budget her CFO slashed last Tuesday and a boss who will hold her personally responsible if this purchase goes sideways. Label her cheap and you’ll sell to the objection. Get curious and you’ll sell to the person.
Here’s what makes labels so dangerous. They’re sticky. Once you’ve decided who someone is, you stop gathering information and start collecting evidence. Every late email, every short reply, every quiet moment gets filed under the verdict you’ve already reached. You aren’t watching a person anymore. You’re watching a rerun of the story you wrote about them.
And notice what happened to the commenters in Erika’s story. She was remarkably gracious about them. She acknowledged that some of the people attacking her husband may have seen something in that clip that reminded them of a time they felt alone and unsupported. In other words, many of them weren’t reacting to Ramses at all. They were reacting to their own history. That’s the part we rarely admit. The labels we hand out often say more about the labeler than the labeled.
Now let’s talk about the announcers, because if you lead people, you are one of them.
By every account, those broadcasters meant no harm. Ramses actually admired them. He was excited to email them and thank them for including his family in the broadcast. They weren’t cruel. They were careless. They had a microphone and a few seconds to fill, and they filled it with a story that wasn’t true.
Leaders have microphones too. That offhand comment in the all-hands. The eye roll in the meeting when someone’s name comes up. The “you know how he is” in a hallway conversation. You may think you’re filling dead air, but your team hears a ruling from the booth, and they repeat it. A few seconds of your amusement can become months of someone else’s reputation.
So what do we do instead? We do the thing that feels slower and turns out to be faster. We listen and learn before we label.
It starts with catching the narrator mid-sentence. When you notice yourself thinking “she always” or “he never” or “they just don’t care,” treat that as a flashing yellow light. Your brain just handed you a guess. Then trade the verdict for a question, and make it a question you genuinely don’t know the answer to. “Help me understand what’s going on” opens a door that “What’s your problem?” slams shut. And before you decide who someone is, ask yourself the question Erika handed every one of us: what might this person be carrying that I can’t see?
You won’t always like the answer. Sometimes the person really is checked out. But you’ll be dealing with the real problem instead of the one you invented, and the people around you will learn that you’re the kind of leader who asks before you assume. That reputation is worth more than any first impression you’ll ever form.
Here’s the detail from this story I can’t shake. As strangers across the internet described how little Ramses must care about his wife, he was at home helping her through the hurt their words were causing. The man the world had cast as the villain was the one holding her up.
Somewhere on your team, in your pipeline or across the table from you right now, there’s a Ramses. The clip looks bad. The story writes itself.
Don’t let it.
Listen first. Learn second. And if you still need a label after that, you’ll finally have earned the right to choose one.
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