Keeping Your Cool When Stuff Goes “Ping”
Being late really bugs me, especially when I could’ve prevented it.
Several years ago, I took a long-term onsite client assignment during Chicago’s peak congestion season (a.k.a. everything but the dead of winter). While juddering down the interstate one morning, dodging potholes and fender benders, I thought: *I really should get this car into the mechanic for a once-over.*
If I had to be late to the client site, I didn’t want it to be for something simple that regular maintenance could have prevented. Been there, done that: I threw out my back changing a flat, seven-year-old tire, on my knees in a snowbank in rural Iowa on a January morning. (That car’s gone, but the sore back visits every once in a while.)
But delays are inevitable, and breakdowns happen. It’s how you react, get a grip, and fix the problem that matters.
A noisy, smelly lesson in getting a grip
To this day, my dad holds the record for Best Breakdown Solution I’ve ever seen.
We were in my mom’s quirky old mini-van: a front-wheel-driven, rear-engined mistake with an anemic four-pot diesel motor. This particular day was a busy one. The family was shuttling my brother to an important and tricky-to-reschedule appointment—a pre-admission college visit, several hundred miles from home. I was too young to be left alone, and my sister had been dragooned to join us because that’s just what happens to middle kids.
Suddenly… Ping.
Then, some mild swearing from the driver’s seat.
Rattle-rattle-rattle.
More swearing, but less mild now.
Matter-of-factly and with surprising calm, my father spoke. “The pedal’s on the floor, but we’ve got no power.”
The van slowed to a stationary idle as he steered us to the shoulder. Out came the toolbox (a fixture in that car), up went the sleeves, and Dad got to wrenching. With the engine at the back, this meant piling our cargo at the side of the road and removing a heavy, filthy hatch.
The “ping” had been the snapping of the throttle cable, Dad explained. The sound it made as it turtled itself to some unreachable place under the car, between its usual home (nicely reachable at the top of the throttle spring in the engine bay) and the mechanical throttle pedal up front. This left little chance of a conventional roadside fix with the tools he had on hand.
Soon, though, inspiration struck.
“Hand me that rope.”
An unconventional solution
Being a van, the driving position was fairly high. And the latch into which the seat belt clicked sat at one end of a long, metal bar, which was itself bolted into the frame below the seat.
That long, metal bar could swing like a lever around that bolt, scribing an arc of almost 180 degrees, parallel to the driver’s seat and reachable with the driver’s right hand.
*A-ha.*
Dad tied one end of the rope to the throttle spring, and the other around that pivoting seat belt bar. We dropped the back seats to give him a more-or-less straight line from the driver’s seat to the engine bay, and… voila.
We were rolling again, in a road-going power boat.
The seatbelt bar was now a throttle lever, and that length of rope had become a makeshift throttle cable. More tension on the rope meant “more go”—he fed or starved the engine of fuel by pushing the lever forward or easing it back.
Got some rope in your toolkit?
We got to the appointment on time, albeit smelling slightly of diesel and a little bit deaf. We’d needed to keep the engine cover off while driving, of course.
I think about it a lot when I’m up against a weird problem with limited tools and a hard deadline.
The lesson isn’t “always have rope.” It’s: when the conventional fix isn’t available, look around at what you have, and see if you can make it work in a way it wasn’t designed for.
Move quickly from “Oh, @#%!” to “Objective → Approach → Solution.” Take a calculated risk to get back on schedule, without risking too much.
That’s the kind of problem-solving I try to bring to the work I do with clients. Not every project goes according to plan. But if you’ve got someone who can think on their feet, improvise with what’s available, and keep things moving without losing sight of the goal, you’ll get there.
Maybe with a ringing in your ears and a little more…fragrant?…than you planned, but you’ll get there.