September and October are always the busy season for me, with everyone back from summer holiday bliss and refocused on whatever tasks lie unfinished from the year’s list of goals. It’s the time of one last big push before the holiday season consumes us once again. During this time, we often scale back our lost in the feed projects to smaller, more personal tasks which somehow seem less interesting as writing subjects than they are as LITF projects. There has just been no time for writing about the look of abject despair on the delivery guy’s face as he works through the spacial relations challenge of his huge metal cart and the double glass doors blocking his delivery path. One door he can manage, but the cart is too wide. Even as he tries the second door, watching as the first closes perilously close to the corner of his metal wheeled battering ram of a cart, he knows he’s stuck. I can see him thinking about throwing one glass door wide, yanking open the second and slamming his cart through, forlornly weighing the likelihood of his shattered future if one or the other closes too soon. Stopping to help, to hold open one door, is such a small thing but I know from his look of thanks that dozens of others had passed by him unnoticed.
Time too has swallowed the story of the elderly woman fighting desperately to separate her chosen shopping cart from its captor, the grocery cart having preceded it in the queue. Although seemingly locked in mortal combat, she’s committed to this cart’s liberation and oblivious to the desires of the other dozen single shopping carts around her, each eager to assist the woman in her shopping. But no, she has decided and it will be that cart or none I suspect, and so I approach. It took some shaking and jostling to pull them apart, and I appreciated the down-and-under cast glances we were both getting from the others streaming past, but I smiled now understanding that having someone jump into the fray with you once committed to a task, even one maybe less than rational, is just a good thing.
It seems, however, in this economy time has not subsumed everyone as it once did during the autumn back-to-work season. My reminder of this came as I was approached recently by a former co-worker via LinkedIn. A hard working professional, I remembered from my prior life, now out of work with ten million others. I wasn’t sure how to help, but knew I could at a minimum give hope and offer to open a few doors. After confirming some facts, wants and preferences, I sent off a dozen emails, and made another dozen calls to friends, to peers and competitors, and to former associates to see if perhaps the stars might align to brighten one’s day. We spoke today on the phone, my former colleague and I, and it wasn’t the relief that two of the calls had become real leads that they were eager to express, but rather simple thanks that someone had gone out of their way to try to help them out.