Oblique Strategy #23 — Driving away from a gas pump with the hose nozzle still in your gas tank is a good thing.
For Walt, it was the best and worst of times. His business had taken off and his success was of the kind everyone wants to cheer for.
He took big risks and he came close to failure too many times to count. Sometimes he was saved by happenstance, but it was usually because of his own hard work.
There’s a limit to how much we want to know about our friends’ good fortune, but Walt never came close to finding it. That’s the way I see it both now and back then when he told me how busy he was.
His description turned into complaint; complaint became concern; concern became desperation. His desperation was on the verge of panic.
He told me, “On the way to my fourth appointment of the day, I noticed I was out of gas so I stopped at a gas station to get a few gallons. I haven’t filled my tank for weeks because I never think I’ve got enough time.
“I know it takes longer to stop three times to pump four gallons than it takes to stop once for twelve gallons,” he said, “but when I’m about to run out of gas, which is frequently, I’m also then late or about to be late for something important.”
I didn’t say anything. Of course it takes longer to pump four gallons in three stops than twelve gallons in one. Walt didn’t need my confirmation. He’s a deliberate and logical person. He articulates what he’s thinking and it’s always sequential.
If it had been someone else, I might have thought he was asking for advice or a reaction, but I didn’t think Walt worked that way. Yet, this was something more than a story.
He continued, “So after I pumped three or four gallons I wasn’t concerned about running out of gas anymore, and I didn’t want to be late, so I left. I left with the fucking nozzle still in the gas tank.”
There was a long pause. I asked, “Did it…?”
“Yeah, it did. I did. I pulled the fucking hose right out of the fucking gas pump.”
This was nearly twenty years ago, and I had never heard of anyone doing such a thing. With someone else it might have been funny, but not with Walt.
My reaction was confused, but he misinterpreted it when he said, “I know. It’s unbelievably stupid. For years I’ve been doing everything I could do and saying whatever I could think of to get people to trust me to manage big, complex projects with lots of potential risks and always lots of money. And I’m the jackass who can’t even pump his own gas. Why would they trust me? Why should they trust me?”
The questions were rhetorical. But then he added, “So what do you think?”
It was one of the first times anyone from my gene pool ever said, “I don’t have an opinion.”
“Well, you aren’t going to say it’s normal, are you?”
“No.”
“What do you think is wrong with me?”
“You’ve said it yourself. You’re too busy. You’re getting used to a higher intensity of demand on your time and attention.”
“Would you write it off as just one of those things?”
“Sure. You had your head, you know, up there. That’s an unfamiliar experience for you. Some of us are more accustomed to it.”
“Would you say it was something like a wakeup call?”
“Maybe. What did the guy at the gas station say?”
Another silence, so I added, “Wait, you went back didn’t you? You didn’t continue down the street with a hose hanging out of the back of your car…”
Walt took his time to assure me, “Oh, I want back. I must have looked scary. The owner of the station didn’t want anything to do with me. He said he could tell I had to be somewhere and that he’d take care of the hose. That kindness won’t be rewarded with patronage. I’m so humiliated by what I did that I’ll never go back — even if it’s the cheapest gas in town.”
I said, “My brother would call that a story to eat out on.”
Walt said, “It’s a lot more than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I did the same fucking thing when I stopped for the next four gallons at a different fucking station.”
I had nothing to say because I didn’t know what to think… until a year later.
One of my children had been in a terrible car accident. He was in intensive care for two weeks, then out, then back in, then out again, and on and on. Our family spent more time at the hospital than anywhere else.
You can focus all your attention toward a hospitalized patient for a week, maybe two, but there are other things that have to be attended to that can’t be done at the hospital (especially in that distant past before the cell phone).
With the passage of time there was more and more compelling business — some of it having to do with my son — that took me away from the hospital even though I felt my place was with him.
One of the things I found I couldn’t do consistently was drive away from a gas station without the nozzle still in the gas tank. As with Walt, it started when I “didn’t have time” to fill the tank.
I was about to run out of gas every three or four days. I vaguely remembered this part of Walt’s story, but back then, I was in the middle of my own story and others weren’t of particular interest.
Unlike Walt, I didn’t pull the hose out of the tank when I drove off. I just stretched it to its limit and it pulled itself out of my car. Then I remembered Walt’s story, but I didn’t remember the punch line, if he had one…
Oh yeah, he did it a second time, and so did I. And then my wife did it — and so did the two other people who where also spending so much time at the hospital.
When I heard that it had happened to our most assertive (and possibly the most competent) family member I asked, “What did she say to the station owner?”
The reply, “She told him it was his fault.”
I was familiar with her logic and, upon extended reflection, I decided that she had a point. This was a time in the history of the gasoline business when one of the steps necessary to pump your own gas was eliminated.
Perhaps it was the final approval of the charge that served as a cue for the driver to take the fucking nozzle out of the gas tank before driving away.
When one station sent us a bill for the cost of reconnecting the hose and the cost of an upgraded connector, I learned that new pumps were attached to the hose with a break-away connector and old pump connectors were being retrofitted. Now it’s been the industry standard for decades.
But fault has nothing to do with the point of this story.
The eliminated cue was essential to vulnerable people on the brink of being frazzled, people who were already overwhelmed and people who had moved beyond their “complexity horizons.”
People like us. The signal was unequivocal.
We were all in over our heads. We hadn’t stopped to put on the oxygen mask before attending to what seemed to be more imperative tasks. We had forgotten — or had never realized — that we required oxygen no matter what.
As Walt had observed the year before, how could we be trustworthy for real responsibility when we couldn’t properly fuel our own cars? I came to believe that he was right. I had become untrustworthy.
It was one of those intense periods, like a divorce, that changed me. Or at least it changed my idea of myself, which is probably the same thing.
I discovered I could do things I thought I couldn’t do, and I discovered an inability to do other things that I thought I could and should be able to do naturally.
The nozzle in my gas tank was a command to stop long enough to come to terms with the fact that I was, in some important ways, both less than and different from the person I had believed myself to be.
Without appreciation and acceptance of those limitations, I, like Walt, was of particular danger to myself, and especially to those I would help.
Next column: Oblique Strategy #24 — I had been listening to him explain how others become fully effective and realized persons when he said, “Mix in the juice of a lemon and drink a large glass of water as soon as you get out of bed.”
— Brian H. Burke is a certified family law specialist practicing family law and mediation in Santa Barbara. A researcher and educator in the field of divorce and family conflicts, he is also the creator of the Legal Road Map™. Click here for more information, call 805.965.2888 or e-mail info@burkefamilylaw.com. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.