Oh No!
At the risk of oversharing, there are two – and only two – things about me that endeared me to my wife and caused her to marry me:
During a freshman year art history class in college I surprised her by being able to speak at length about the significance of contrapposto in classical sculpture.
When I tell a story that I think is seriously funny, I crack up laughing and can’t get through it.
And we’ll be married 20 years this October. So there you go. As for what stories crack me up, here is one of my favorites…
Back in another life I managed money invested in emerging markets. This meant I got to travel quite a bit with my friend and mentor Bill Mann, which was the best part of the job. Bill, despite being a veteran traveler, could occasionally be absent-minded, and that’s how we found ourselves in Santiago, Chile, with Bill needing to get pages added to his passport so there was room in it for him to be stamped back into the U.S. upon our return. He dutifully made an appointment at our embassy there to do so and we had a tight window for me to drop him off in the rental car and then get to our next meeting.
As we all know, you can’t park anywhere close to a U.S. Embassy, so I dropped him off and then told him I’d wait across the way in the parking lot of a service station. I did that, but after about 20 minutes the attendant came over and tapped on my window and politely told me to get the eff out of there because I wasn’t a paying customer. I acquiesced to his request and therefore started circling the embassy hoping to be passing by when Bill came out. And it was maybe on my tenth or twelfth loop on the Avenida Andres Bello that I saw Bill emerge from the embassy, walk across the way to the service station, and inexplicably get into a different car.
What the eff is he doing? I thought. But then I went around the bend and lost sight of him.
When I came back around the other side I pulled into the service station and saw Bill standing there looking sheepish. I slowed down; he hopped in and told me to drive.
“Did you get into that other car?” I asked.
He had, he said. He thought it was the same gray sedan as our rental and since he was rushing to get to our next meeting he had blindly opened the door, sat down in the passenger seat, and commanded his new amigo to drive.
That’s when an elderly Chilean man, fearful that he was being carjacked by a six-foot-four American, stared at Bill with wide eyes and bellowed “Oh no!” (and this is where I usually crack up telling the story and can’t get through it).
Bill, realizing his mistake, slowly exited the car with his hands up and then waited awkwardly in the lot until I swung back around to pick him up with the elderly Chilean man eyeing his new amigo suspiciously the whole time.
The reason I’m telling this story now, aside from the fact that I enjoy telling it, is because something nearly identical happened to me just the other day. There I was sitting in my car outside of the Mizzou Aquatic Center waiting to pick my son up from swim practice. It was freezing out (a recurring theme this winter) so people were rushing to their rides. I had my head down checking emails on my phone when the passenger door opened and a strange kid burst in and told me it was time to go.
“You’re not my son,” I stammered, hoping I wasn’t about to get mugged.
That’s when the kid (I later found out it was Luke) looked up from his phone and said “My mom has the same car!” Then my actual son rushed up and asked Luke what he was doing in his seat. Luke, some combination of mortified and confused, said again that his mom had the same car and scurried off looking for her.
So then I had to tell my son the “Bill Man Oh No” story on the way home…and couldn’t get through it without cracking up.
All of that is to say that we tend to make a lot of unexamined assumptions when we’re in a rush and that those assumptions can expose us to a lot of risk – “Oh No!” risk, let’s call it. So even if you’re in a rush and it seems inefficient, try to always take the minute to make sure you’re doing what you think you’re doing.
And have a great weekend.
– Tim
