"When I show up in your life..."

"A little while ago, my car broke down and needed to be towed, and I was told to await a call from the tow truck driver. So I sat and waited, and got on with the process of rearranging a day that had been pitched into disarray. Shortly, my phone rang, and I answered.

"Hello," said a voice. "This is Alexander the Great. Where are you parked?"

Now, when you answer the phone and a stranger describes themselves to you using the name of someone who's been dead for two and half millennia, it gets your attention.

...

Why, I asked, was he Alexander the Great?

"It's simple," he said. "My name is Alex, and I'm the best tow truck driver around here. So I'm Alexander the Great." He said this cheerfully but not boastfully. It was a happy fact, nothing more.

I asked why he was so good at what he did, and he explained in some detail the mechanics of what he had just done with my car, and what had been tricky and had demanded an adjustment to his approach, and what he did in other similar situations, and what he did in similar but slightly different situations, and what he did in a vast array of very different situations, and along the way added a few editorializations about how the office always sent him to the most difficult jobs, and how there were days when he wished they would stop haranguing him by radio and let him get on with what he did best.

But what was distinctive about his approach, I asked. Why was he so sure that he was the best? He smiled.

"Here's why," he said. "Here's the thing that I can do, and that no one else I know can do. When I show up in your life, you're having either a bad day or a really bad day. And whatever I can do to put your car on the truck, of course I do that. But that's not what you really need. What you really need is to stop worrying, for just a few minutes, about what's going to happen next, or how much the repair is going to cost, or how you'll get home, or what the insurance company will say, or how to rearrange your schedule for the week. That's what I do for you for the few minutes we're together. I help you forget. That's why I'm Alexander the Great."[Moi ici: Recordar Think "outcome before output"]

When Alex explained all this to me, the words arrived as if from another planet. Not because I didn't understand what he was saying, but because I was aware in an instant of the vast gulf between his experience of work and mine."

 Trecho retirado de "The Problem with Change" de Ashley Goodall.