Bad Days:

“Don’t miss the chance to do good just because you are having a bad day.” When I heard this earlier today, it sent my mind in two directions. I wonder how often I do that. How often do I hold back or just not help because I’m having a bad day. Probably more often than I want to admit.

Perhaps even more telling is wondering where I would be today if people had always held back and not helped me just because they were having a bad day. Consider this.

I was eight or nine when I was trying to put the bridle on my pony. I was in a field at the edge of town and Tarzan was not being very cooperative. Instead of standing still and letting me put the bit in his mouth, he picked that time to jerk back and try to run away. I lost my balance and fell, somehow managing to have a stick poke into my leg. Since I could stick my finger into the resulting hole, even at that young age I knew that stitches were likely in my future.

I managed to walk to a nearby house and knocked. I asked the lady who came to the door if I could call or if she would call to get my mother to come and get me. Her response? “I don’t need this today. I don’t believe that you got a hole in your leg and even if I did, I’m not fooling with such nonsense today. You walked here so can walk yourself home.” I suspect that the most important point is that I still remember the incident all these years later. Her bad day turned into my limping walk home.

Like me, you too can probably think of a few times when someone could have helped but didn’t, just because they were having a bad day. What we tend not to remember are those times when someone did help, despite the bad day they were having. The fact of it is that we probably didn’t even know that they were having a bad day. They just helped and nothing was said or hinted at about their bad day.

There is nothing very complicated about this. We all get many opportunities to do good, to help. Sometimes we can follow through and help, we can contribute to the success of someone else and sometimes we can’t for various good reasons. My only point is that we should try to avoid using our bad day as an excuse not to help, not to do good.

To be sure we both know what I’m thinking about, a sticky problem is a situation or issue that keeps hanging around despite our efforts to fix it or to make it go away. Let me share an example.

My parents lived in a manufactured home onto which they had added an extra room. The roof leaked in that extra room whenever it rained really hard. My dad had someone fix the roof, but a few months later, the leak was back. He had the roofer come back and repair the leak. It was fine for a few months but the leak returned. He had the roofer come back again and repair the leak. This fix-it process repeated two more times.

He was talking with a friend about his leaking roof. The friend said, “I’ll bet I know what’s wrong. Just patching the roof won’t work.” The friend went on to suggest a solution that seemed silly to Dad, but the friend offered to fix it and only charge if his solution worked. The friend came over and it only took him twenty minutes do apply his fix. My parents lived in that house for many more years with no leaks. When I asked, Dad said he didn’t understand what his friend had done or exactly why it worked, did know that the friend refused any payment and staying dry was good enough for him.

A sticky problem is anything that needs a solution, that doesn’t respond to your efforts to fix it or correct it and gets more annoying or frustrating as time passes. Your teenager not cleaning his room or not doing her homework, a team member not doing his or her share, recurring arguments about trivial issues, or any other problem or issue that persists and what you are doing to fix it isn’t working are all examples of sticky problems.

Here’s what usually happens. We try to solve the problem with no success. We try again and again, getting more and more frustrated. What we are doing just isn’t working but we keep trying, using the same approach, the same solution strategy. The change is that we escalate the intensity of our effort, especially if the problem is with another person. The result is that the fallout from our failing efforts is frequently worse than the problem. Nonetheless, we persist.

What to do is not easy to figure out, but there is always one thing we can do and usually should do. Unless the problem is causing real and permanent damage or harm like Dad’s leaking roof, Don’t do anything, including stopping whatever you have been trying to fix the problem. But you have to do something? No, you don’t. At least you don’t have to do anything until you come up with a different and better way to work on the problem or issue. Just give it a rest and then keep giving it a rest for a couple of weeks. Sometimes the problem or issue just goes away by itself given a chance and if not, you are likely to figure out a better and more effective way to deal with it. If the problem is still there and you don’t have an answer, you are no worse off since what you were doing wasn’t helping anyway.

What if I were to tell you that your location within one meter was being tracked while you are at work or perhaps while you are at most any public location? What if I further told you that there was no way for you to opt out of being tracked? Finally what if I told you that you were being tracked for your safety and for the safety of everyone around you? In addition, I offered no evidence to support the notion that this tracking actually made you or anyone else safer? Would you think the tracking was a good idea and something that you would welcome? I doubt that you would and neither would I.

As objectionable as such tracking would be for us, it is real and in place for many American children in our schools. These young people are being subjected to such tracking and are being conditioned from the age of five or six to see being tracked is normal and to be expected. For those children, the notion of personal privacy is being undermined and the idea of cameras and other technology being used to know where they are at all times is being normalized.

The tracking is managed by the radio signals from their cell phones; and if they don’t have a cell phone, they are required to wear a wrist band that serves the same purpose. Cameras supplement the radio signals. You don’t think anything like this is happening in schools in your community? You may be right, but then again, you may be wrong. The practice is present in many schools today and the number is increasing.

My only point is this. Unless you think that your being tracked with records of where you are and where you have been along with how long you were there is perfectly acceptable, subjecting children to the Kid Spies is not acceptable either.