When I fumble and fail

“I want you to go yourself Ray,” the boss, Bob, said. “He’s a really important customer and he sounds upset. Go quickly, he is waiting for you.”

My attempt to begin a whole new career had failed, so I had temporarily returned to my old trade as a TV technician.

As I drove to a destination on the northern edge of London, I muttered and grumbled to myself. “So, just because I went to college to train for the ministry, Bob thinks I have some special ability to solve problems with difficult customers.”

As I drove, I tried to forget my annoyances and think about the customer. When Bob explained the client had a high military designation, I had thought, pompous and superior.

Bob also explained the customer had invented a process used in the petroleum industry that had made him extremely wealthy and that he had founded a major Canadian corporation. I pictured a demanding, arrogant know-it-all. When Bob also told me the client had retired years previously, I pictured a senile, infirm man, maybe in a wheelchair. I thought, “Oh, brother, how do I get into these things.”

I didn’t feel any better when I arrived at a huge mansion. Following Bob’s instructions, I rang the bell, opened the door and loudly announced myself. From within a voice asked me to enter. I followed instructions from the disembodied voice and arrived in a roomy den with a large TV set at the far side. I couldn’t see anyone in the room.

The voice said, “I just can’t seem to get this thing connected.”

Only then did I see a foot protruding from under the TV set. Moving quickly forward, I found the famous man seated on the floor with the end of a TV cable in one hand, a pocketknife in the other, and a frown on his face.

“It came off when I moved the set,” he said, “and I’ve been an hour trying to reattach it.”

I dropped down beside him and, with a few deft strokes of the appropriate tools, I reinstalled the connector and hooked up the set. Next I caught his hand and helped him to his feet.

Then for a few never-to-be-forgotten minutes I had the privilege of chatting with a gracious, intelligent old man; a man who had spent a lifetime doing the impossible, but that day a connector on a TV cable had confounded him. From then on, as long as I worked in the trade, he would allow no one else to touch his TV set.

I often think of the Major General, remembering how in his senior years, because of decreasing dexterity, a simple task had perplexed him. However, I remember more the grace with which he accepted my assistance.

I thought of him again the other day when, due to my own advancing years and loss of dexterity, I couldn’t complete a task and a younger person offered to help.

I had trouble repressing my first reaction to push the helper aside and deny my frailties.

So now, when I fumble and drop things, and can’t complete tasks I once did with ease, I remember an old man who sat on the floor behind a television set, graciously waiting for me to help him.