You have two choices when something wildly crappy happens to you. You can get upset and feel sorry for yourself for a while. That’s perfectly okay. Or you can see the incident for its ridiculousness and laugh about it. You’re going to get to the second one no matter what. Not every bad thing turns into a funny story later, but most do.
I’ll give you an example. I did a semester abroad in Kenya studying wildlife management. Studying abroad was probably the one thing about college I was most excited about. However, my trip out of the country went about as wrong as it could without killing me.
First, the night before I was supposed to catch my flight out of Amarillo, Texas, a freak ice storm hit. I spent that evening looking out of our motel window and watching power transformer explode in blue flames all along the high way. I frantically tried calling my program to let them know about what would certainly be a delay, and the airlines to try and reschedule flights. The hotel’s phone system died with the power, dropping me out of calls.
A day late, the airport finally reopened. I was to take a small turbo prop to North Carolina. We climbed aboard and waited. The pilot spun up the engines, and horrible black smoke poured out of the left engine. The engines turned off and we waited. They told us we needed a mechanic, and we disembarked. Six hours later, a man drives up in a pickup truck, hops out, goes to the engine, pulls a spark plug, replaces it, and drives off. We reboard and fly to North Carolina.
On my next flight, it becomes clear that there are suddenly two people for every seat, and it’s because the previous flight going to NYC had run off the runway without even taking off. We spend an hour while they beg people to take free tickets and get off the plane.
My flight out of NYC is delayed on the runway when a woman begins screaming and crying hysterically and running up and down the isles. Once she’s calmed, she explains in fractured English that she’s left her purse, containing her passport, in the terminal. They radio back, get it on the next flight over, and we take off.
By the time I make it to London, I’ve been awake for over 36 hours. I have a 12 hour layover, so I decide to take the train into London and buy a bus tour of the city to see some of the sites. I notice something peculiar—the city changes around me in a blink of an eye. The tour guide, a young woman about my age, leans over from the mike and explains that I’d been asleep for the last five or six blocks. She tells me to go ahead and sleep and she’ll wake me up when we get back to the train station. And she does.
In the airport I sleep some more, and I wake with a start as I hear the “last call” for boarding of my flight to Kenya. I make it just in time, running up right as they attempt to close the doors. The person in the seat to my right trains attack dogs for living. He spends the entire 10+ hour flight talking about it.
As it was happening, I was miserable. What else could go wrong? Now it’s my most-trotted out anecdote. It’s the funniest thing that has happened to me. In retrospect.
You might as well skip the feeling bad part and go straight to the laughing. That’s what I learned this week. What about you?
I don’t think I’d be too upset about an experience like the one you just described. I’d just be nervous.
When I type up a long email or blog entry, or whatever, and something goes wrong and I lose everything I just typed, that gets me everytime.
I’m embarrassed about how easily I lose my temper and I wish I lived in a more private area so my neighbors can’t hear me yelling. Usually after I calm down, I realize that whatever I was mad about wasn’t that big a deal or even if it was, I didn’t have to blow up about it. But acknowlegding that doesn’t seem to do much in keeping it from happening again.
I think this is left over from our evolutionary history. A quick temper was a good thing when our lives had no small things. Everything was a matter of survival. A temper saved your life. Now it just makes us look silly.