There were seven or eight of us at an early morning meeting and Bob, who was chairing the meeting, fell asleep. The rest of us crept out, and a colleague and I went down to the street and stopped about a dozen people before we found six perfect strangers willing to go along with our practical joke. They came up and sat around the conference room table for a couple of minutes (the rest of us were watching from the anteroom), and then one of them made enough noise to awaken Bob. At that point another of them said, “O.K. Bob, we’ll do it your way, but you’ll have to deal with the consequences if it doesn’t work out.” The six strangers then got up and left. Bob sat there with a bewildered look on his face for two or three minutes before returning to his office. He never mentioned the incident to any of us.
I suppose we sometimes may know exactly why we make a mistake, but usually a mistake is just a mistake. One of my co-workers when I worked at the CPR, a usually very dependable chap we called Bopper, made a beauty. His mistake caused a loaded boxcar to end up in St. John’s, Newfoundland, rather than Saint John, New Brunswick. At the CPR, incidents like this required a report to be filled out. One of the questions on the form was: “Why did you make this error?” Bopper told the supervisor overseeing the form’s completion that he had no idea why he made the mistake. The supervisor (who couldn’t stand Bopper at the best of times) snarled, “Well, I know why you made it!” “Okay,” said Bopper, handing him the form, “then you fill it in.”
I’ve never been considered a patient person, but exercising patience may have once saved my life. I was driving to PEI for my annual vacation. This was decades before the Confederation Bridge was built, so any delay could mean missing the last ferry, which would mean an overnight stay on the wharf. I pulled into a gas station in a little town a bit northeast of Quebec City. The attendant told me he had to move a couple of cars before he could serve me. (This was before the introduction of self-service.) Normally, because I still had a quarter of a tank, I would have left and pulled into the next station. But this day, for some reason, I waited patiently. The delay was about five minutes. About three miles down the highway I came upon a multi-vehicle accident in which six people had been killed and six others seriously injured. I learned later from newspaper coverage that the accident happened about five minutes before I arrived on the scene.
He was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and we never knew which one we’d be dealing with. He’d could be perfectly charming and effective at a meeting, and then the next time be an insufferable, arrogant jerk; an inconsistency that was hampering his career. He had a large family he doted on. One day as we were going into an important meeting, I said to him “Act as if your kids are in the room.” There were no problems with his behaviour from that moment on.
Shortly after I started working full time, I’d saved enough money to buy some new clothes. I went into a menswear store on Yonge St. in Toronto and carefully looking at the price tags, picked out some items I had enough money to buy. I took them to a man I thought was a clerk, but who turned out to be the owner; a gentleman by the name of Max Gold. He asked me my name and where I worked. After I told him he said, “Lyman, let me show you some items I think would look much better on you.” As he made each choice I kept a mental tally of the cost. “Mr. Gold,” I said, “these are too expensive. They add up to almost three times the cash I have.” He said, “That’s all right. Give me a down payment that you can afford now and drop in each payday and give me what you can until it’s paid off.” He went on to say, “You see, Lyman, when you buy something cheap, you may be happy when you pay for it, but you’ll be disappointed every time you use it. When you buy a quality article, you may be concerned when paying for it, but you’ll be pleased every time you use it.”