I witnessed the following exchange between two semi-executives in a meeting today. They were discussing a communications program at my company, and the exchange began with claims that rumors were flying about the program:

Person 1: “I’m in charge of this program. If there are problems or rumors, why haven’t they been sent to me?”

Person 2: “We’ll send those we hear about, but we can’t send the ones we don’t hear about.”

Person 1: “If you haven’t heard about them, then how do you know that they exist?”

We give points to Person 1 for getting the last word in, but, really, Person 2 wins the argument for recognizing that the unknown rumors will always outnumber the known ones.