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The Flat Tire Lesson

The next time you worry (or need to change a flat tire), remember the jack

JACK RUNNINGER, O.D.

“That story you told in your column a few months ago literally changed my life,” an optometrist told me some 25 years ago. Hopefully, he meant for the better, so I’m telling it again, in the hopes it can help other worry warts. The tale will be new to O.D.s who graduated less than 25 years ago. And chances are, anyone who read it back then has too lousy a memory to remember it, so it will be “new” to them as well. The story:

A traveling salesman story

A traveling salesman had a flat tire while driving home at dusk one evening. When he looked in the trunk of his car, he discovered he had left his jack at home. The road was little traveled and no other motorists came by to give him any aid. The he noticed lights coming from farm house a couple miles across a field.

The only solution he could see was to walk across the field, borrow a jack and return to change the tire. When he had walked about half way, the lights in the house went out.

“Oh, Oh!”

“Oh, oh,” he said to himself. “Evidently, they’ve all gone to bed and by the time I get there, they’ll probably all be asleep. I’ll have to pound on the door to wake them up, and that’s going to make them awfully angry. Then when I ask the farmer if I can borrow his jack, he’s going to cuss me out for waking him. We’ll get into an argument and maybe even come to blows.”

The more he thought as he walked, the madder he got about what he envisioned would happen. When he finally got to the house, he pounded angrily on the door. In a minute he heard a voice from an upstairs window ask, “What can I do for you?”

“I just wanted to tell you,” he answered angrily, “what you can do with your damned jack!”

Had it all wrong

“Mrs. Hyplus is coming in at 4:15,” your receptionist tells you first thing in the morning. “She says she can’t wear her new glasses.”

“Geez, what a great way to start the day,” you grumble to yourself. “She waits 10 years to get her glasses changed and now she’s holding me at fault because she can’t get used to the big change I had to make. She’s going to expect me to remake them at no charge. Then she’s probably going to be unhappy because she won’t be able to read as well as she wants.”

You proceed to work up quite an anger about the situation. You fret and stew all day long. At 4:15, Mrs. Hyplus arrives. And what happens?

“My new glasses are just great,” she enthuses. “But the left temple hurts my ear, so I can’t wear them for very long.”

You are hurting too. But it’s not because your frame needs a simple adjustment — it’s because of stress over a situation that never occurred.

90%!

“Ninety per cent of the things we worry about never happen,” said Dale Carnegie. Perhaps the next time you get uptight from anticipating a problem that might happen, remembering the salesman and the automobile jack might help a little. OM

JACK RUNNINGER, OUR CONSULTING EDITOR, LIVES IN ROME, GA. HE’S ALSO A PAST EDITOR OF OM. CONTACT HIM AT RUNNINGERJ@COMCAST.NET.