Well, I’m determined to put something up today, but I’m going to keep it short because it’s deadline week (again!) and I have some juicy stuff to get up on the website and then a newsletter to write to get the word out about all the cool stuff that’s coming up soon….
This is kind of a do-over, but it also connects to the series of being stuck in our own stories….
You’ve probably heard the notion that generals are always fighting the last war? In particular, they always seem to focus on what went wrong and making sure that THAT doesn’t happen again.
We can certainly see this idea at work in the ever-more-absurd screening process you have to endure before getting on a plane these days.
Some bozo had a bomb in his shoe- OK we’ll all take off our shoes now.
Someone planned to use liquids to bomb a plane- so we all empty our water bottles, and all our toiletries now come in itty bitty tubes and vials.
I’ve ranted and raved about how stupid this is, but was rudely reminded this week that we all do this: focus on our mistakes, where things went wrong, and do whatever we can to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
On the one hand, this makes perfect sense. It would be a shame not to learn from our past mistakes. But let’s just say this strategy has its limitations…
It all started with a ball cap
Sometime in the last year, AJ lost a ball cap on a plane. It was no big deal, not a priceless, autographed heirloom by any means, but it was annoying (to me) to have lost it. And therefore when AJ and I left last Wednesday for a short trip to TX, I was a royal pain in the butt about his hat. He wore it in the car on the way to the airport and as we were waiting in the security line, I bugged him to put it into his backpack so he wouldn’t lose it. He resisted, said he wouldn’t lose it this time, but I wasn’t about to take any chances.
I kept on bugging him, and finally (probably just to shut me up) he took it off and stuck it in his backpack. But I still wasn’t satisfied because he stuck it in the outer mesh pocket of the backpack.
I wanted it inside the zippered part, where it couldn’t possibly fall out.
Can you tell that I was completely convinced that only my constant vigilance was going to keep this hat from joining the other one in the land of lost stuff?
Part of the background here is that I’ve been known to be a little scattered. It’s part of my right-brained nature, and for the most part, I manage OK. But I’m a little defensive about it, and I really do hate losing stuff. One of my stories is that ‘competent grown-ups don’t lose stuff.’ And of course I want to be a competent grown up because the alternative seems to be ‘hopeless, incompetent idiot.’ So, of course, I am bound and determined to be a fully competent grown-up and not lose the hat this time around.
We hit the ground in Dallas and guess what I’m asking?
“Do you have your hat?”
“Yes mom, I have my hat.”
We exit the aircraft with the hat, and I’m ready to declare victory (at least until the next flight!).
We have the hat but….
It’s not until later that evening when we’re on our way to dinner and I tell AJ to grab his sweatshirt that we realize that the sweatshirt is nowhere to be found. In fact, neither of us has seen it since he got on the plane and unzipped it.
Yup… you guessed it.
We left it on the plane.
I wish I could say that it was stuffed under the seat in front of him or somewhere out of sight. But no, it was right there in plain sight.
On his seat.
I never even looked. I was too busy worrying about the blasted hat.
The good news is that after numerous attempts to contact a live human being, I learned that the sweatshirt was safe and sound in the baggage claim and we recovered the sweatshirt on our way home.
The moral of the story?
I’m all for airline safety. I really am. But I get a bit peeved at the lack of imagination that the TSA shows in creating its policies and practices. Let’s face it, now that the shoe thing has been done, do we really think someone’s going to try THAT trick again?
But in my obsessive focus on the hat, I was operating out of exactly the same kind of thinking. I was determined not to lose the hat. And guess what- we didn’t lose the hat. But my narrow view of the outcome to be avoided meant I missed the bigger picture.
Has anything like this ever happened to you? Have you ever been so committed to avoiding one problematic situation that you create another?
Please share in the comments!
