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[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#22: "I'm going to panic in a crisis."
It would be nice to have a life where things that require quick thinking just don't happen and someone can go through their life without getting to know cortisol as a very good friend. Unfortunately, the people who are generally able to avoid those kinds of situations are the kind of people who have been rich since birth, maintained that wealth all throughout their lives, and never had to worry that their phenomenal wealth would be taken from them by anyone who might have control over it or obtain it through deceptive or other criminal means. And they have been able to live in places that are not subject to war, upheaval, or the decision of the country next door that your right to exist no longer matters. And unlike the one who would become the Buddha, when confronted with the realities of sickness, old age, and death, they do not decide to put their resources toward enlightenment or trying to make it so others do not suffer so, but usually toward trying to prevent themselves from haing to confront those realities as long as possible.
( It turns out that I'm a problem-solver most of the time, rather than someone who stays in a panic state. )
Knowing you don't panic in a crisis sometimes leads to a fun time, though. Last month, the director of my library system was out to my location to film some marketing material and to do a story time with me so they could get the stuff they wanted. The first thing that went wrong was the clipped microphone was on the jacket, and the director took the jacket off to do the story time, which was no real trouble, if what they had wanted was just the visuals. The slightly more concerning thing that happened was that while in the middle of the story time, the power cut at my location. (A substation had failed.) So I suddenly didn't have my slides or my soundtrack or anything else electronic that I normally use for the program. That would certainly be cause to panic, right? A power outage in a story time while the director of the library system is there.
Not really. One of the rules of web page development is that a site should degrade gracefully, so that it is still functional and usable even if the person coming to the site doesn't have lots of bandwidth, or hasn't turned on JavaScript, or is still trying to access the Web through Lynx or Netscape Navigator 3. Story times are arranged in the same way. The electronic things are nice, but they are not necessary to the experience of the story time, and so when the power cuts out in the middle of something that you were doing, you wait a beat or two to see if the power is coming back on, and then you continue the story time as if nothing had happened. Which I did. And it was fine. The grownups went along with it, the director went along with it, and when we went to the post-story time play session, the lights and the power returned, so we didn't have to make any decisions about closing the library, either. No actual need to panic about any of this at all. (And yet, I gave the director and the cameraperson the kudos for rolling with an odd situation, rather than receiving any such thing from them on their end. Just another one of those situations where "meets expectations" apparently includes continuing to do a program through a power outage.)
So, no, it turns out that I'm not the kind of person who stays panicked in a crisis. I'm going to find solutions, even if they're suboptimal.
#22: "I'm going to panic in a crisis."
It would be nice to have a life where things that require quick thinking just don't happen and someone can go through their life without getting to know cortisol as a very good friend. Unfortunately, the people who are generally able to avoid those kinds of situations are the kind of people who have been rich since birth, maintained that wealth all throughout their lives, and never had to worry that their phenomenal wealth would be taken from them by anyone who might have control over it or obtain it through deceptive or other criminal means. And they have been able to live in places that are not subject to war, upheaval, or the decision of the country next door that your right to exist no longer matters. And unlike the one who would become the Buddha, when confronted with the realities of sickness, old age, and death, they do not decide to put their resources toward enlightenment or trying to make it so others do not suffer so, but usually toward trying to prevent themselves from haing to confront those realities as long as possible.
( It turns out that I'm a problem-solver most of the time, rather than someone who stays in a panic state. )
Knowing you don't panic in a crisis sometimes leads to a fun time, though. Last month, the director of my library system was out to my location to film some marketing material and to do a story time with me so they could get the stuff they wanted. The first thing that went wrong was the clipped microphone was on the jacket, and the director took the jacket off to do the story time, which was no real trouble, if what they had wanted was just the visuals. The slightly more concerning thing that happened was that while in the middle of the story time, the power cut at my location. (A substation had failed.) So I suddenly didn't have my slides or my soundtrack or anything else electronic that I normally use for the program. That would certainly be cause to panic, right? A power outage in a story time while the director of the library system is there.
Not really. One of the rules of web page development is that a site should degrade gracefully, so that it is still functional and usable even if the person coming to the site doesn't have lots of bandwidth, or hasn't turned on JavaScript, or is still trying to access the Web through Lynx or Netscape Navigator 3. Story times are arranged in the same way. The electronic things are nice, but they are not necessary to the experience of the story time, and so when the power cuts out in the middle of something that you were doing, you wait a beat or two to see if the power is coming back on, and then you continue the story time as if nothing had happened. Which I did. And it was fine. The grownups went along with it, the director went along with it, and when we went to the post-story time play session, the lights and the power returned, so we didn't have to make any decisions about closing the library, either. No actual need to panic about any of this at all. (And yet, I gave the director and the cameraperson the kudos for rolling with an odd situation, rather than receiving any such thing from them on their end. Just another one of those situations where "meets expectations" apparently includes continuing to do a program through a power outage.)
So, no, it turns out that I'm not the kind of person who stays panicked in a crisis. I'm going to find solutions, even if they're suboptimal.
