When the universe smiles at you
Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay
There’s a Swedish saying “En olycka kommer sällan ensam” (When it rains, it pours). If that is true, the opposite must also be true, but I don’t know any similar saying by heart. So, I prefer to think of it as if the universe is smiling at you. Because it sometimes feels as if the whole universe conspires to help you. When I have had those positive experiences, the typical scenario is that I am extremely stressed out about something, and then suddenly the problem just solves itself without attention. Yes, sometimes the best solution to a problem can simply be to just ignore it. Last week I experienced one of the most enjoyable smiles so far.
I had been planning to go on a field measurement in the south of Sweden for several weeks. My plan was to travel on Thursday, measure Friday and then travel back home on Saturday. And the same Tuesday I had a veterinary appointment. Wednesday and Tuesday were filled to the brim with meetings and that left me with just eight hours of honest “work time” to get things done – for the whole week! I was a bit stressed out by this honestly, but the life of a consultant is similar to the airlines who always over-book their flights. They know that statistically, some people will cancel their flights and in the end most planes can be filled this way. Occasionally the model fails of course, but mostly it works. And there you have the consultant’s life also. We always sign up on more commissions than what we can manage, because we know that some of them will always be delayed or cancelled. And consequentially we end up with a pretty good schedule.
Last week was one of those weeks where the airlines would have offered you a check if you could postpone your journey due to an overbooked flight. But I didn’t have to do anything. I spoke with the veterinary on Monday, and the medication for my dog was delayed, so we postponed the appointment. This gave me another four hours of productive work. And on Wednesday, the site manager from the measurement site calls me and I could hear that he was under pressure. They had suffered delivery delays on the building site and the part of the building that I was supposed to verify wasn’t ready. They would have to work the night shift to finish before Friday. For me, this was great news. I could here the relaxation in his voice when I explained that I was also a bit swamped and proposed that we postpone the measurement. The timing couldn’t have been better for both of us. Three whole days were instantly added to my schedule.
Almost simultaneously when I hung up the phone, my colleague in Malmö called and was also a bit stressed out. We sometimes ship measurement equipment back and forth between our offices (too expensive to have full redundancy), and this takes careful planning with the shipping delay of 2-3 days. He told me that he knew that I was supposed to go on a field measurement, but due to some short notice commissions we wouldn’t be able to ship the equipment we needed in time. (In this case, we were just going to do a switcharoo between two sound analyzers and the offices.) I laughed and replied, No worries mate, the measurement was just cancelled. I will send you the instrument today. The field trip was just cancelled, literally a couple of minutes ago. Now, our logistical challenge was solved! This was just like killing three birds with one stone. The week that started out with just eight hours of productivity, turned out to be one of the more effective work weeks I have had. And all I had to do was – Nothing. Nothing at all.
By the way, when I got back from my dog walk tonight, I realized that I had lost my airpods on the walk. They had fallen out from my pocket somewhere on my 30 minute or so walk in the forest. I knew exactly the path I had gone, so I just sighed and put my headlamp back on and went back out again to spend the next hour searching for that little white case in pitch black darkness. I stepped out the door and look to my right and found them within seconds. I laughed loudly and gave a big smile back to the universe.